The dog was already forty feet out when Harlan started after him, calling the name low, the way you call a dog you don’t want to spook. “Otis. Otis, come.”

The dog didn’t come. He went on toward the middle of the lake, toward the dark seam where the ice thinned, nose down, following something only a dog could want.

Harlan followed.

He knew better. Everybody in the county knew better than to walk the lake in a thaw. But the dog was Ruth’s dog, the last warm thing she’d left in the house. She’d been gone since October, and Harlan had spent the winter letting the rest go cold — the woodstove out most nights, the phone left to ring, the neighbors’ casseroles going gray in the icebox. He wasn’t going to let this one go through the ice.

He kept his steps flat and wide. The surface held. It talked under him — a long groan that ran out ahead like a rope paying out — but it held, and he told himself that was the ice settling, not the ice deciding.

“Otis,” he said. “You dumb animal. Come here.”

The dog stopped. Turned. Looked back at him with that trusting face, and for a second Harlan thought it was over, that the dog would trot back and they’d both go home and he’d pour a drink and sit in the chair that still smelled like her.

Then the seam opened, and the dog was in the water.