When Stephanie Moore-Malmstrom got a text that her dog, Sheba, had been found in a town more than 600 miles away, she assumed it was a prank.

“My initial thought was, ‘Where’s my million dollars and my cruise?’” Moore-Malmstrom told The Dodo. “’Somebody’s scamming me.’”

A police officer identified Sheba via her microchip, but Moore-Malmstrom was still skeptical. However, as soon as Moore-Malmstrom saw Sheba through a FaceTime call, even though the pup was much older, she knew it was her dog.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, you have my dog, you have our baby,’” Moore-Malmstrom said.

With the help of Pilots N Paws, an organization dedicated to saving animals by flying them back to their families or to no-kill shelters, Sheba was soon in the air, heading home.

The Moore-Malmstrom family later deduced that after Sheba was stolen out of their Baytown, Texas, yard in 2018, she was taken to the Texas panhandle, where she was eventually adopted by a family, whom she lived with for four and a half years. When that family had to relocate and re-home Sheba, her new owners, having decided they didn’t want to care for her, left Sheba on the street. Sheba was living outside, being looked after by a local teen, when an animal control officer found her and checked her microchip.

Sheba seems very grateful to be back with her family. Though they’ve spent so many years apart, they’ll have the rest of their lives to make up for lost time.