Roxanne Pellegrino's world collapses when her husband dies unexpectedly. The only way she feels she can deal with her all-consuming grief is to run away from her life. She leaves her home, her career and her friends, heading for Peaks Island, a tiny speck off the coast of Maine. A former psychologist, she finds herself taking a job as an animal warden and reinventing her past so it doesn't include the tragedy of her husband's death.

But despite Roxanne's best efforts to cut herself off from her emotions and people in general, she finds herself drawn to her quirky new neighbours. And then Roxanne meets Lloyd.

Lloyd is a stray dog, a large black Labrador retriever who clearly has been woefully mistreated. And so begins a remarkable friendship between a wounded woman and a wounded dog. And as both slowly begin to heal, Roxanne begins to deal with her grief and discover that happiness can be found in unexpected places...

Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.

She is currently the fiction editor forPatchwork Journal, an online journal sponsored byPatchwork Farm, an internationally based writing center. Jacqueline teaches workshops on writing and the combination of yoga and writing.