Ivy looked up and down the deserted beach for signs that the hound’s owner was walking nearby. When she didn’t see anyone, she followed the dog and spotted it darting under a cottage with shuttered windows and an empty driveway. This time of year, this entire stretch of beach was deserted, so surely the dog didn’t belong to anyone at the cottage.

Interested, she followed the boardwalk down the dune and then cut across the sandy soil to the beach house. The cottage, built in the 1970s, was a long rectangular box resting on eight-foot stilts with a shingled asphalt roof and shutters. The deck ran along the ocean side, and there were two sets of stairs, one in the front and another in the back.

Ivy made her way through the weeds and sand and came around the front of the house to a concrete driveway. She walked under the house but didn’t see the dog. Entirely possible it had dashed across the beach road to another home.

She wasn’t sure why the dog had captured her curiosity. It appeared to be in good health, and its lean, wolflike body moved with a native’s confidence. She walked past two plastic garbage cans and toward a small utility room.

There was no sign of the animal. Her stomach growled. “Okay, back to real life.”

As she turned, she heard a very faint whimper coming from the other side of the utility room. It couldn’t be her wolfhound, but her curiosity nudged her around the back of the house.

The instant she rounded the corner, she saw a small dog burrowed into a beach grass nest. Ivy could see her very swollen pregnant belly.

Ivy approached slowly and knelt by the mother dog, who looked up at her and wagged her tail. “Ah, mama. You’re alone, aren’t you?” She scratched the dog between the ears. “You can’t have your pups here. I need to get you out of the cold.”

The dog drew back slightly as she shrugged off her jacket and laid it over the dog’s tense body. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

The dog couldn’t have weighed more than twenty pounds and looked like she was a mix of dachshund and who knew what. “I’m picking you up, so please don’t bite me.”

Another contraction tightened the dog’s belly, so Ivy waited until it passed before she scooped up the creature. She cradled her close and hurried along the beach road until she arrived at her driveway. Up the cottage stairs, she pushed open the door.

She grabbed the comforter she’d used last night and piled it in a corner of the room behind boxes, which she hoped would give the mama dog a sense of privacy and security. The dog looked up at her and tried to rise before another contraction sent her back to the quilt’s folds. “You’re safe. Just relax, if that’s possible at a time like this. I’ll get hot water or clean towels or something. That’s the beauty of being here with me now. We have hundreds of towels and dozens of comforters, so don’t worry about a mess.”