Riley

Riley: The Story of How "That" Dog Became My Dog

In November 2019, Phil wanted exactly one thing: a quiet Sunday evening in front of the television, in a house ruled, gently and completely, by two senior cats. Then his wife, Robyn, came home from a long weekend in Puerto Vallarta, dropped her suitcase, and announced the words that would upend everything: "We're getting a dog."

The dog in question was a skeletal little stray who had trailed Robyn and her friends off a Mexican beach and refused to leave. Her friends couldn't keep him. So Robyn, glowing with certainty that her animal-loving, stray-defending, self-proclaimed cat-whisperer husband would share her joy, brought "that dog" home to a man who had absolutely not agreed to any of it.

He resisted. Thoroughly.

Riley is the warm, funny, disarmingly honest true story of what happened next: a reluctant standoff that escalates into a full-blown domestic cold war, a cat kingdom thrown into chaos, and a marriage tested by one uninvited, big-eared houseguest. Told with dry humor and unexpected tenderness, and threaded with short interludes that let Robyn, Phil, and others speak for themselves, it traces the slow, stubborn, utterly unplanned journey from "that dog" to, somehow, "my dog."

It is a book about the small lives that quietly rearrange our own. About the plans we cling to, and the ones love makes for us anyway. About how the very thing you swear you never wanted can become the thing you cannot imagine living without.

Anyone who has ever been outvoted by someone they love, ruled by their pets, or ambushed by a soft spot they didn't know they had will recognize themselves here. By the final page, the question is no longer whether Riley belongs. It is how Philippe ever thought he could keep him out.

Warm, wry, and quietly moving, Riley is a short, irresistible read about reluctant beginnings, second chances, and being proven wrong in the best possible way.