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

Chapter 7

The house became suspiciously quiet.

“Frost?”

No response.

Silas walked into the hallway. The puppy was coming toward him from the room at the far end — the spare room, the one Silas never went into — holding an old rubber ball in his mouth.

Silas stopped.

It was Atlas’s ball. Worn smooth in places, covered with old tooth marks, faintly dented from years of being thrown and caught and carried through the house. Silas had put it away with several of Atlas’s things after the funeral, and he had not touched any of it since. He had locked the box, more or less, by the simple act of never going into that room.

Frost approached with the ball between his teeth. Silas reached down. His hands stopped halfway, as if they had hit glass.

Frost dropped the ball beside Silas’s boot. Then he lay down on the floor, chin near the ball, and closed his eyes.

For several seconds, Silas remained standing.

The memory was not the one he expected. Not the last day — the clinic, the IV line, the quiet at the end — but the ordinary ones. Atlas stretched across the sofa, taking up nearly the entire cushion while Silas sat crushed at the edge, laughing at nothing in particular. Atlas at the door when Silas came home, the whole back end of him moving with the force of pure welcome. Atlas pressing his head into Silas’s hand behind the ear, that exact spot, the way he always did.

Silas sat down on the floor beside the puppy. He did not take the ball away.

Frost rested his chin near it and went to sleep.

Later, Silas placed a small dog bed near the wall outside his bedroom. Frost circled it once and lay down. But he did not stay there long. A few minutes later, Silas heard his paws crossing the floor.

Frost was standing at the front window. Beyond the dark yard, the lights of Pine Hollow Animal Rescue glowed between the trees.

Silas leaned against the doorway. Frost stayed at the glass, his ears pricked toward the trees.

“She’s still there,” Silas said.

One ear moved toward him, but the puppy did not turn.

Silas walked back toward his room. “Come on.”

Frost followed him halfway, then stopped and looked toward the window again.

“Tomorrow,” Silas said.

This time, Frost returned to the bed. He curled into a small white shape, his nose tucked under his tail, Atlas’s old rubber ball beside his paws.

Silas turned off the hallway light.

For a while, he stayed awake, listening to the faint movements outside his room. Frost shifted once, gave a quiet sigh, and settled.

The house had been silent for so long that Silas had forgotten how different silence could feel when someone else was sleeping inside it.

He closed his eyes. Three days. That was the agreement.

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

He turned toward the clock. 5:43. For a few seconds, nothing seemed wrong at all. The cold blue light of early morning pressed against the curtains. The house was still. Everything was where it had been when he closed his eyes.

Then he looked toward the small bed outside his bedroom.

Frost was gone.

Silas was on his feet immediately, the way a man gets up when he already knows, before he has seen anything, that something terrible is waiting to be found. He crossed the hallway. He checked the living room, the kitchen, the mudroom.

The old dog door hung open. Cold air moved through it like a question.

He stepped into the backyard. Disturbed soil beneath one section of the fence. A gap barely wide enough for a small body, dug out of a soft patch near the bottom. Frost had found the weak spot the way puppies find everything — by testing, by pushing, by refusing to believe in the limits the world had set for him.

Silas stared at the hole.

“Frost?”

Nothing answered.

He hurried back inside and grabbed a leash from the hook beside the mudroom door. Only when he reached the porch did he look down and see it was Atlas’s old leash, the leather worn smooth by eight years of hands and weather.

Silas stopped for a single beat.

Then he set it on the porch rail and ran.