Vanessa believes someone took her. The little Chihuahua was only four years old.
There was no trail to follow. No sighting. No phone call. Just an empty seat where her best friend had been.
Anyone who has ever loved a dog can imagine that feeling. The searching. The hoping. The jump of the heart every time a small brown dog trots past on the street.
And then, slowly, the painful quiet that settles in when days become weeks, and weeks become years.
But Vanessa never truly let go.
She told reporters she thought about Flor every single day.
Life, meanwhile, kept moving. In the years that followed, Vanessa built a new life. She became a mother to four boys. About three years ago, the family moved to Evanston, a suburb just north of Chicago.
Here is the detail that touches me most of all.
Vanessa would show her children photographs of Flor. She described the little dog to them as their big sister.
Think about that for a moment. Four boys growing up with a sister they had never met. A sister with four legs and big ears, whose picture lived on in their mother’s heart and in their family stories.
Still, Vanessa was realistic. Twelve years is a very long time in a small dog’s life.
“I had not fully given up on her,” she told NBC Chicago, “but it’s just like ‘so many years had passed,’ and I was like ‘I don’t think I’ll ever see her again.'”
She had no way of knowing that, in another state, a storm was about to change everything.