A Place Beside You — A TOCA Ebook

A quietly moving story about a woman, a dog, a cat, and learning to make room for yourself in the life you share.

Mara knows how to be useful. She is less certain who she is when being useful is no longer enough. After losing her job, she moves into a smaller apartment with Pip, a dog devoted to a particular hedge, and Fig, a cat who has never agreed to become anyone's reassurance. Among borrowed lamps, difficult conversations and the ordinary demands of care, Mara begins to notice how often she asks the world to tell her whether she deserves her place in it.

What you get

• The ebook (EPUB) — reflowable, with a linked contents page; set the text size you like in any EPUB reader.
• A print-friendly PDF — 77 pages, 6 × 9 in, for reading on any screen or printing the reflections.

Inside

• Sixteen chapters in four parts — Arriving, Learning to Stay, A Life Large Enough, What We Carry. About 14,500 words: an evening or two of reading.
• Beside the story — a short reflection after every chapter.
• Optional invitations — small writing prompts, never a test or a streak.
• To finish — a letter to the reader, seven ways to return to the book, and twelve reading-group questions.

Who it's for

Anyone who has felt deeply loved by an animal, worried they were not doing enough, or forgotten to include themselves in the care they give.

Please note

The story includes job loss, strained family relationships, an animal's illness and death, and grief. The book tells you which chapters (13 and 14) so you can choose when to read them.

What it isn't

An original short work of reflective fiction: not a memoir, a full-length novel, a clinical self-help program or veterinary advice. For changes in your animal's health or behavior, talk to your veterinarian; for persistent distress of your own, reach out to a qualified professional. The text and cover were created with AI tools and edited by TOCA.

Practical details

• Two files (EPUB about 2.7 MB, PDF about 4 MB), delivered by email right after checkout
• The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo and most reading apps; you can also send it to a Kindle with Amazon's Send to Kindle
• English only. Digital files only; no physical product is shipped.
• For personal use. Please don't share, resell or redistribute the files.

Also from TOCA: The Days You Waited for Me, a gentler novella about coming home, an older dog, and learning to stay (the dog is alive at the end).

The story is the why; the TOCA workbooks are the how. Find all 28 guides in The Complete TOCA Library.

Better rest for happier pets.