The Real Nala

The real Nala was a dachshund.

She was a partner and daily companion for many years — present through the ordinary days and the significant ones with the particular consistency of an animal who has decided that where you are is where she is, and that is the arrangement, and it is not up for renegotiation.

She was not the fictional Nala. The fictional Nala is a character — built from observation and memory and the specific craft of making a person on a page. She reads the room before Tim does. She assesses clients in silence. She holds stillness as discipline rather than default. She has a bench along the near wall of Suite 201 that she chose herself, facing the door, because that is the correct position from which to see everything that enters.

The real Nala informed all of that. Not directly, not as a one-to-one translation, but in the way that all true things inform fiction — through the quality of attention, the specific weight of a presence in a room, the particular way a dachshund moves through the world with the complete conviction that the work matters and her part in it is not incidental.

When she was gone, the space she left was the shape of these books.

The series began with her. Every page of it carries something of who she was — not as sentiment, not as memorial, but as the truest thing available when a story needs to know what loyalty looks like in practice. She showed that, consistently, for years, without ceremony or announcement.

It seemed only right to return the favour.

The Brass & Bone Investigations series is dedicated to her.

Built on loyalty.