This is a private preview for our partners: please do not share the link. It is the first book we made, Milly’s Walk, about my own dog. Printed, it is a 24-page hardcover, 8.75 inches (22 cm) square. Every page is one picture and a few lines.
We are open about how the books are made: the illustrations are created with AI image tools in a watercolour style, then guided and checked by a person against the owner’s photos. The words come from the owner’s own memories.
Mornings began by the fire. Milly would be curled on her red checked bed, still warm from the embers, one eye open to check whether we were really getting up. We always did, eventually. She never doubted it.
Then someone said the word, and the morning arrived. Rain or shine, there was no weather she would not walk in, and no walk she would not call the best of her life.
The old gravel pits were hers. The water lay flat and gold in the evening light, and Milly read the edge of it like a letter: every reed, every stone, everyone who had been there before her. We had a destination. She had a library.
No stretch of water was ever refused. She met it at a flat run, as if it had been waiting for her all day, and what followed was somewhere between swimming and an argument with the lake.
Then the shake, delivered with total commitment and perfect aim. Nobody within six feet stayed dry. Nobody ever moved away, either.
Home meant the kitchen, and the kitchen meant possibility. Her nose arrived a moment before the rest of her, already reading the air: something baked, something buttered, something that might, at some point, be dropped.
Milly loved to eat, with a sincerity most of us keep for important things. Toast. Biscuits. The crust nobody else wanted. She never snatched. She simply looked at you, and waited, and somehow it always worked.
By evening she was back on the red bed by the fire, full and heavy and entirely content. She snored. Her legs would twitch and paddle as she ran through some field we couldn’t see, and we would watch her, and wonder what she was catching.
She followed us everywhere, one step behind, all the way down the hall. If we stopped, she stopped. If we turned, she turned. We stopped noticing, the way you stop noticing something that has always been there.
Wherever we sat, she found the place at our feet, as though the floor had been waiting for her. The weight against an ankle, the warmth through a sock: ordinary things, and the ones that mattered most.
And when even our feet were not close enough, she climbed up beside us, all of her, and let out one long sigh that settled the whole house. Milly isn’t here to walk beside us now. But the gravel pits still shimmer in the evening, the fire still glows, and in every ordinary, happy moment there is a Labrador at our feet. Always.
Most of all, she was our friend. And we miss her. In memory of Milly.
If it feels right for the families you care for
Each book is about one animal, written from the owner’s own memories and painted from their own photos. The owner sees a proof before they pay, and can ask for changes twice. For every book ordered through you and delivered we pay you €5, or give the same to a pet charity of your choice. There is no obligation. To talk about working together, write to hello@mattandmilly.com.