Everyone Wanted the White Puppy—But He Wouldn’t Leave Without Her

Chapter 1

At 5:43 in the morning, Officer Silas Greer woke because his house had gone silent — and the silence was wrong.

The small dog bed against the wall outside his bedroom was empty. Not rumpled, not warm. Empty. Frost had been lying there when Silas finally switched off the hall light, a pale white curl with his nose tucked under his tail. Now the shadow in the doorway held nothing.

Silas was on his feet before his mind caught up. He crossed the living room barefoot, his socks sliding on the hardwood, and shouldered through to the mudroom. The old dog door hung open in the dark, swinging on its hinge, and the cold poured through it the way water pours through a breached dam. Atlas had used that door for eight years. Silas had stopped noticing it months ago. Now it stood ajar, and the iron wind moved across his ankles like something alive.

In the backyard, disturbed soil lay beneath the fence. A gap barely wider than his fist, dug out of a soft patch of earth at the bottom. Tiny white hairs clung to the splintered edge of the wood.

Frost was gone.

Silas did not stop to put on boots. He was outside, the leash from the hook in his hand — and only when he reached the porch did he look down and see it was Atlas’s old leash, the leather worn smooth, the brass clip still faintly warm. He set it on the porch rail and ran.

Late November had settled hard over Ironwood, Michigan. Snow lay on the grass between his property and the trees, and it crunched under his bare feet like broken glass. Black River Animal Rescue — Pine Hollow, everyone called it — sat just beyond the narrow strip of woods behind his yard, across a small service road. Silas had lived in that distance for years. He had walked it at midnight in a coat, in the rain, with Atlas jogging at his heel. He had never run it in socks at dawn, shouting a name he had only known for eight hours.

He reached the trees. The snow had stopped, but the light was still gray, the branches throwing long shadows across the ground. He called the name again. Nothing answered but the wind.

For one moment the fear that rose in him felt much larger than the situation in front of him. The puppy had been in his house for one night. He had agreed to take him for three days — a favor, a kindness, something short and simple and temporary. He had no right to the panic that was climbing his ribs like a hand up a rope. Yet Silas’s mind was already moving to places he did not want it to go. He remembered another morning, fourteen months ago, and a kennel that had been empty in a way that meant everything had changed.

He forced himself forward.

The service road was empty in both directions. He stood at the edge of it, chest heaving, the cold burning his bare feet, and he looked toward the woods where the puppy could have gone, and toward the shelter where the puppy should not have been able to go, because he did not know which direction meant Frost was safe and which meant Frost was lost forever.

He pulled out his phone and called the shelter as he walked. No answer. Too early. He kept walking.

The shelter’s lights were just beginning to show in the gray dawn when he saw the small shape — and stopped so fast the snow sprayed from under his heel.

A pale puppy sat against the employee entrance, mud streaked across his chest and front legs, breath steaming in the cold, bits of wet leaf stuck to his fur. He was shivering. He was watching the door like it was the only thing in the world that mattered.

Silas opened his mouth.

The door opened first.

A shelter worker in a heavy coat stepped out, saw the puppy, and knelt. Frost did not wait for her to reach him. He stood, slipped past her legs before she could even lift a hand, and vanished into the building — heading not for the food room, not for his old kennel, but down the hallway where the medical wing sat quiet and dark and holding everything he had crossed the frozen dark to find.

Silas reached the door and stood in it, breathing hard. The worker pointed down the corridor. “He’s inside.”

Silas moved past her. Then he slowed.

Frost was lying against the outside of Willow’s kennel, his body pressed to the mesh. On the other side of the wire, the sable puppy had pushed herself close to him, her good front leg through the opening. Their paws touched. Fresh scratches ran across Frost’s front feet from the digging, and Willow was licking at one of them through the wire, her tongue moving over the torn skin in small, careful strokes.

Silas stood in the corridor with his bare feet going numb and his hands shaking at his sides. On the way over, he had imagined finding Frost injured. Lost. Nowhere at all. He had imagined every possible terrible thing except this one.

He crouched beside the puppy. “Don’t scare me like that again.”

Frost leaned against his leg, but he kept one paw on the wire, pressed to his sister’s.

Somewhere in the building, a light came on. Silas heard a file drawer open in the office behind him.

He knew, without being told, that something had just begun that would not end when the three days did.