Troy was just nine, maybe ten. The kind of kid who always had crayon on his hands and a backpack twice his size. After weeks stuck inside, he started slipping these little letters under every door in the complex—bright red and blue scribbles, offering to walk people’s dogs after “this virus.”
Everyone thought it was sweet. Some neighbors even teared up.
But it wasn’t until I opened mine and looked up from the paper that I realized… Troy was standing there.
No leash. No dog.
Just this hopeful look on his face, like someone waiting to be picked.
“You got one?” he asked, his eyes flicking toward my apartment. “A dog?”
I said no.
He smiled anyway, but it didn’t quite reach all the way up.
“Oh,” he nodded. “Okay.”
And as he walked away, still holding a handful of notes, I caught just a whisper of what he muttered under his breath:
“I just miss the noise…”
And then he disappeared down the hall, leaving me with an ache in my chest I couldn’t quite explain.
Later that evening, while scrolling through social media—a habit born out of boredom during lockdown—I saw something that stopped me cold. A neighbor had posted a photo of one of Troy’s notes alongside her own dog, a golden retriever named Max. In the caption, she wrote: “This boy left this note earlier today. Isn’t he adorable? He came by asking if anyone needed help walking their dogs. What a sweetheart!”
The comments were full of praise for Troy—the same kind words everyone seemed to echo when they talked about him. But something felt off. Not bad, exactly, but… incomplete. Like we were only seeing part of the picture.
It gnawed at me. That tiny voice saying, “I just miss the noise…” It wasn’t about dogs. Or maybe it was, but not in the way we thought
The next morning, I decided to take action. I grabbed a box of granola bars and headed outside, hoping to catch Troy before he wandered too far. Sure enough, there he was, sitting cross-legged on the curb near the mailboxes, staring into space. His stack of brightly colored papers lay beside him, slightly damp from last night’s rain.
“Hey,” I called softly, not wanting to startle him.
Troy glanced over, his expression wary at first, then curious. “Hi.”
I held out the granola bar. “Peace offering.”
