The Ice Beneath Us

The dead weight of him was a shock, a fifty-year betrayal of remembered strength, pulling her down toward the ice.

The porch boards screamed under her boots. Each step was a gamble against a thin, clear lacquer of ice the storm had spat across the wood. The cold was a physical blow, a thief that stole the breath from her lungs before she could protest, leaving a hollow, aching space in her chest. Her hand, raw and red inside a thin wool glove, was clamped around Danny’s arm. The dead weight of him was a shock, a fifty-year betrayal of remembered strength, pulling her down toward the ice. His body, usually so solid and reassuring, was a sack of cold stones she was dragging from the precipice. His feet scraped, stumbled. The sound was swallowed by the keening of the wind as it scoured the side of the house, a relentless, sanding noise that had been the soundtrack of their lives for the past three days. Three days of ice. Three days of silence. She gritted her teeth, the muscles in her jaw burning. The doorknob was a sphere of pure, biting cold that seemed to suck the last of the warmth from her fingertips. She twisted, shoved. The door, swollen with damp and frozen at the jamb, resisted. A sob of pure frustration caught in her throat. She put her shoulder into it, using her own weight, her own fading strength, against the house itself. It gave with a groan of tortured wood, and they stumbled inside, a tangle of limbs and frozen fabric, into the sudden, cloying warmth of the living room.

He collapsed onto the hooked rug by the door, not falling so much as folding, his body surrendering to gravity. He lay there, a sodden heap, his breath coming in shallow, white puffs that misted in the warm air. Pauline slammed the door against the wind, the sound a flat, final crack that sealed them in. For a moment, she just stood there, leaning against the solid wood, her own breath a ragged counterpoint to his. The house was a bubble of warmth and light in a world of shrieking, frozen darkness. The fire in the hearth crackled and spat, casting long, dancing shadows that made the familiar room seem alien and threatening. She looked down at him. Danny. Her Danny. His hair, what was left of it, was plastered to his scalp in icy tendrils. His face was a waxy, bluish white, the color of skim milk. His eyes were open, staring up at the pine-paneled ceiling, but she knew he wasn't seeing it. He was seeing the ice. He was still out there. 'What were you doing?' The words were a croak, torn from her throat. They had no substance in the warm air. He didn't answer. He didn't even blink. Fear, cold and sharp, lanced through her, a fear that had nothing to do with the storm and everything to do with the man on her floor. This wasn’t the quiet, stubborn man she knew. This was a stranger wearing his skin.

She knelt beside him, her knees protesting with a series of sharp cracks. His coat was a shell of ice, crackling as she touched it. Her fingers fumbled with the zipper, the metal tab so cold it burned. She had to use her teeth to get a grip, the metallic taste flooding her mouth as she pulled it down. Underneath, his flannel shirt was soaked through, clinging to his skin. She worked mechanically, pulling off his boots, his coat, his shirt, her mind a blank slate of horrified action. Each item of clothing was stiff, heavy with frozen water. She piled them on the rug, a dark, wet mound that steamed faintly in the firelight. She expected him to shiver. He should be wracked with tremors, his body fighting the deep, invasive cold. But he was just… still. It was the stillness that terrified her most. The absolute, profound lack of response. She got a thick wool blanket from the chest by the window, the one his mother had knitted decades ago, and wrapped it around his bare torso. He remained limp, his arms flopping uselessly at his sides. She cupped his face in her hands. His skin was like stone. 'Danny,' she said, her voice louder now, sharper. 'Danny, look at me.' His eyes shifted, a slow, grudging movement. They focused on her, but there was no recognition in them. They were flat, empty pools reflecting the firelight. He blinked once, slowly, like a reptile. 'The ice,' he whispered, his voice a dry rustle of leaves. 'It’s not thick enough.' She recoiled as if struck. The words made no sense, yet they landed in her gut with the weight of a terrible, unspoken truth. Not thick enough for what? The question hung in the air between them, a poisonous, invisible cloud. She had found him a hundred yards out, a dark shape against the vast, pale expanse of the frozen lake. Her flashlight beam had cut through the swirling ice pellets, finding him standing there, staring down at his feet. The wind had been trying to tear him from his spot, but he stood rooted, a man mesmerized. When she had called his name, her voice ripped away by the gale, he hadn't turned. She’d had to trudge out there, the ice groaning under her own cautious weight, and physically grab him, turn him, drag him back to the shore, back to the house, back to her. He had come without a fight, but without a single word of explanation.

Now, in the warmth, the words came, and they were worse than the silence. She stared at him, at the hollows under his eyes, the new, sharp lines around his mouth that fifty years of marriage had not prepared her for. The storm was just a storm. It howled and raged, but it was a known quantity. This, the man inside the house with her, was something else entirely. An unknown. A variable she could not account for. And as the fire spat and the wind screamed, Pauline felt a dread colder than any ice settle deep into her bones. The threat wasn't outside. It was here. It was inside. Lying on her floor, wrapped in his mother's blanket, staring at nothing.

The next day dawned not with light, but with a subtle lessening of the dark. The world outside the picture window was a study in gray and white, a landscape erased and redrawn by ice. Every branch on every pine tree was sheathed in a thick, clear coating, bending them low, some already snapped and fallen. The lake was a vast, unbroken sheet of white, textured only by the drifts the wind had sculpted during the night. The wind itself had quieted to a low, mournful moan. Inside, the only sounds were the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner and the soft hiss of the embers in the hearth. Danny was up. He sat in his worn leather armchair, the one closest to the fire, staring into the flames. He was dressed in a thick sweater and corduroys, but he still had the blanket draped over his shoulders. He hadn't spoken a word since his cryptic utterance about the ice. Not when she’d half-lifted, half-bullied him into their bed last night. Not when she’d woken every hour, reaching out in the dark to make sure he was still there, his breathing a shallow, unsettling rhythm beside her. Pauline made coffee, the familiar ritual a flimsy shield against the growing unease. The smell of the brewing coffee, usually a comfort, seemed cloying today, too thick for the strained air in the cabin. She poured two mugs, her hands moving with a deliberate slowness. She needed things to be normal. If she acted normal, maybe normal would return. She carried a mug to him, holding it out. 'Here.' He didn't look up. His gaze remained fixed on the fire. She placed the mug on the small table beside his chair. The ceramic clinked against the wood, a sharp, loud sound in the quiet room. 'Danny?' Nothing. His stillness was an act of aggression. A wall built of silence, and she was on the outside of it. She backed away, retreating to the kitchen, the mug of coffee in her hands growing cold. She stood at the kitchen sink, looking out the smaller window that faced the side yard and the woods beyond. A deer, gaunt and desperate, picked its way through the snow, stripping bark from a young birch tree. Survival. Everything was about survival.

Later, the sound started. A rhythmic, grating noise. Scrape. Pause. Scrape. Pause. It pulled her from her trance at the sink. She moved to the doorway of the living room, peering in. Danny had a small wooden box on his lap. His ice fishing kit. It hadn't been opened in at least five years, not since his arthritis had gotten too bad in his hands. But now he had it open, and he was taking out the lures, the hooks, the tiny, colorful jigs. He had a small whetstone in one hand and a long-shanked hook in the other. Scrape. Pause. Scrape. He was sharpening it. His movements were slow, methodical. His eyes, narrowed in concentration, followed the movement of the steel against the stone. The firelight glinted off the sharpened point, a tiny, wicked spark of light. Pauline felt a tremor start in her hands. 'What are you doing?' He didn't stop. Scrape. Pause. Scrape. 'The ice will be thick enough soon,' he said, his voice low and raspy, not looking at her. 'Need to be ready.' 'Ready for what? You haven't fished in years, Danny. Your hands…' She trailed off, the protest dying on her lips. It wasn't about fishing. She knew that with a certainty that was chilling. He was preparing something. This was part of a plan she couldn't see, a logic that was entirely his own. He placed the sharpened hook down on a cloth and picked up another, its barb cruelly curved. The scraping sound began again, setting her teeth on edge, each stroke of the stone against the metal a new layer of fear being honed inside her. She watched him for what felt like an hour. He worked his way through the entire box. Hooks, then the points of the gaff, even the small blade of the pocketknife he kept in the kit. Sharpening. Always sharpening. The pile of gleaming, deadly-looking metal grew on the cloth beside him. The air grew thick with the metallic, oily smell of the stone and the steel. It was the smell of a workshop, of a task being done. But here, in the fire-lit quiet of their living room, with the world frozen outside, it felt like the smell of a slaughterhouse.

Pauline needed to break the spell. She needed to hear another voice, a sane voice from the outside world. Her sister, Carol. Carol would know what to do. Or at least, her cheerful, mundane chatter about her grandchildren and her garden club would be an anchor in this swirling vortex of unease. She walked over to the old rotary phone on the hall table, its black, heavy body a relic from another time. She lifted the receiver, the familiar weight of it in her hand a small comfort. She put it to her ear. Silence. Not the gentle hum of a dial tone. A dead, flat, empty silence. 'The phone's out,' she said, her voice louder than she intended, an announcement to the silent man in the chair. He didn't respond. The scraping continued. She checked the cord. It was plugged into the wall. The storm, then. Of course. The ice would have brought down the lines. It was a perfectly logical explanation. But logic had begun to feel like a luxury she could no longer afford. She jiggled the cradle. Nothing. She felt a prickle of panic, a feeling of being well and truly cut off. No phone. No way to call for help, if help were needed. And the unshakable feeling that it would be. She walked back to the living room doorway. 'Danny, the phone is dead.' He finally looked up from his work. His eyes met hers, and for a fleeting second, she saw the man she married, a flicker of lucidity in the murky depths. Then it was gone. 'I unplugged it,' he said, his voice flat. She stared at him. 'You what?' 'From the jack. Behind the table. All that crackling on the line. The storm. Gives me a headache.' He looked back down at the lure he was polishing, a small, silver fish with a triple-barbed hook. 'But… the line might not be down. We don't know. I wanted to call Carol.' 'Carol's fine,' he said, dismissing her sister, her fears, her entire world with three quiet words. 'Just leave it.' He wasn’t looking at her, but it was a command. Pauline's heart began to hammer against her ribs. He was lying. She knew he was lying. There had been no crackling on the line; she'd used the phone the morning the storm hit. He had deliberately, consciously, cut them off. The isolation was no longer a consequence of the weather; it was a cage he had built around them. She walked back to the phone, her movements stiff. She knelt down, her old joints screaming in protest, and felt behind the heavy oak table. Her fingers brushed against the wall, the baseboard, and then… the dangling cord. The plastic tip was cold. She felt for the jack, her fingers finding the small, rectangular hole. She pushed the plug back in. It clicked into place with a sound that felt like a gunshot in the silent house. She stood up, lifted the receiver, and pressed it to her ear with a trembling hand. The same dead, profound silence. He had been right. The line was down. But he had unplugged it first. He had made sure. Why? The question echoed in the silent house, in the empty space on the telephone line, in the terrified chambers of her own heart. Why would he make sure they were cut off? The answer that came to her was so monstrous she tried to push it away, but it clung to her, cold and heavy. No witnesses. No one to call. No one to hear her scream.

The day wore on, a slow, agonizing crawl of minutes marked by the ticking clock. Danny eventually put away his sharpened hooks, his movements precise, closing the wooden box with a soft click. He went back to staring at the fire. Pauline tried to read, but the words on the page were just black marks, meaningless squiggles. Her mind kept replaying the scene with the phone, the casual way he had admitted to isolating them. She found herself watching him, studying him. The way his hand rested on the arm of the chair. The slow, even rise and fall of his chest. Every tiny movement seemed laden with menace. Was he breathing faster? Was he clenching his jaw? She was turning into a nervous wreck, a paranoid old woman. Maybe the isolation was getting to her. Maybe he was just old and confused, his mind addled by the storm and the confinement. She tried to cling to that thought. It was a lifeline. But then she would remember his eyes when he spoke of the ice. The clarity. The focus. That was not confusion. That was purpose.

She decided she needed air. Not the howling, ice-pellet-filled air of the storm, but just a moment outside the thick, watchful atmosphere of the cabin. The generator needed to be checked. It was a valid reason, a necessary chore. It was on the far side of the house, housed in a small lean-to. It gave her a reason to put on her boots, her hat, her coat. A reason to escape his silent gaze, if only for a few minutes. She went to the coat closet by the door. She reached for her heavy parka, the dark blue one with the fleece-lined hood. Her hand met empty air. She frowned, patting the space where it always hung. Nothing. Danny’s heavy wool jacket was there. Her lighter spring coat. But the parka, her essential winter armor, was gone. A small, cold knot formed in her stomach. She checked the other side of the closet. No. She got down on her hands and knees, peering into the dark, dusty corners behind the boots. Nothing. 'Danny, have you seen my parka?' Her voice was tight. He turned his head slowly. 'Your blue one?' 'Yes, my blue one. It's not in the closet.' He looked back at the fire. 'I moved it.' The cold knot in her stomach tightened. 'You moved it? Where?' 'Porch.' The word was flat, devoid of any inflection. The porch. The enclosed, unheated front porch. It was little more than a glassed-in box, a place to leave snowy boots and store firewood. In this weather, it would be as cold as the outdoors. Why on earth would he move her coat there? She walked to the door that led to the porch, her boots making soft, hesitant sounds on the floorboards. She opened it. A wave of frigid air washed over her, chilling her to the bone. And there it was. Her parka wasn't hung up. It was folded. Neatly. Placed on top of the firewood box like an offering. She stepped out onto the cold concrete of the porch, the door swinging shut behind her, plunging the small space into a dim, gray twilight. She touched the coat. The nylon shell was stiff, brittle with cold. It felt like touching a corpse. It was so cold it would be useless, offering no warmth, only a chilling, stiff embrace if she were to put it on. She picked it up. It was heavy, inflexible. Why? The question screamed in her mind again. Why do this? There was no logic to it. It wasn't a helpful act. It was the opposite. It was deliberate. It was… cruel. It was a way of keeping her inside. Making it harder to leave. Making the one tool she had to survive the outside world into a useless, frozen block. She stood there in the frigid air of the porch, clutching the frozen coat to her chest, and the last of her rationalizations fell away. This wasn't confusion. This wasn't old age. This was calculated. He was penning her in. Sharpening his tools. Cutting them off from the world. And making sure she could not escape. The generator was forgotten. The need for fresh air was forgotten. All she could feel was the icy grip of the truth. She was trapped in here with a man who was methodically taking away her options, one by one. She turned and looked back through the glass of the door, into the warm, fire-lit living room. He was still sitting in his chair, a dark, silent shape against the flames. He wasn't looking at her, but she felt his eyes on her, a heavy, suffocating weight. He knew. He knew she had found the coat. He knew what she was thinking. And he didn't care.

Clutching the frozen parka like a shield, she walked back into the living room. The warmth of the room felt false, a lie. She dropped the coat on the floor between them. It landed with a heavy, stiff thud. The sound broke the silence. Danny looked at the coat, then at her. His expression was unreadable. 'My coat,' she said, her voice shaking but clear. 'On the porch.' 'Cold out there,' he replied, his gaze drifting back toward the window, toward the endless white of the lake. His disinterest was more terrifying than rage would have been. It was as if she were a minor annoyance, a buzzing fly in the face of his grander, silent purpose. 'Why was it there, Danny?' she pushed, needing to hear the lie, needing to see his face as he said it. 'Why did you move my coat to a place where it would freeze?' He didn't answer right away. The grandfather clock ticked off five seconds, each one a hammer blow against her heart. He sighed, a long, weary sound, as if her question was an immense burden. 'Things get moved,' he said, his voice quiet. 'Things change. You think they’re one way, but they're not.' He was not talking about the coat. She knew it. He was talking about everything. About them. About the life they had built in this house, on this lake. The foundation she had assumed was solid rock. He finally turned his head and looked at her, truly looked at her. His eyes were clear, lucid, and utterly devoid of the warmth she had known for half a century. 'You look at that ice,' he said, nodding toward the window. 'Looks solid. Looks like you could drive a truck across it. Walk to the other shore. Safe.' He paused, letting the silence stretch. 'But underneath… it’s just water. Cold. Moving. It’s always changing. The thickness is never the same, day to day. A warm current from a spring, a weak spot from a submerged log. You can't trust it. One step, you think you're safe. The next…' He shrugged, a small, final gesture. 'It's impermanent. All of it.' A profound chill, one that had nothing to do with the frozen coat on the floor, washed over Pauline. He was speaking in parables, his words a thin veil over a horrifying meaning. The shifting ice. The weakness underneath. The single step that leads to oblivion. He was talking about her. About them. This wasn't a meditation on winter. It was a threat. The most articulate, terrifying threat he had ever uttered, wrapped in the quiet language of the lake he loved. 'What are you planning, Danny?' she whispered, the words barely audible. He gave her a small, sad smile that didn't reach his eyes. It was the smile of a man who had made a decision, a man who had moved beyond argument or persuasion. He looked down at his own hands, resting in his lap. They were old hands, spotted and wrinkled, but they were still strong. Strong enough. 'Things have to be set right,' he said softly. 'You can't leave things to chance.' He stood up then, the blanket falling from his shoulders. He walked past her, not even glancing at the frozen coat on the floor. He went into the kitchen. She heard the clink of a glass, the sound of the tap running. A simple, domestic sound that was now shot through with a terrible, unbearable menace. Pauline sank into her own chair, her legs suddenly unable to support her. Her gaze was fixed on the coat, a dark, frozen shape on the rug. An omen. He was going to kill her. The thought wasn't a panicked flight of fancy anymore. It was a certainty. A piece of ice that had lodged itself in her heart. He was going to wait until the ice was thick enough, and then he was going to take her out there. One wrong step. An accident. A tragic story for the people on the other side of the lake to tell, once the thaw came. The grieving husband. The treacherous winter ice. It was a perfect plan. Simple. Clean. And she was utterly, completely alone with him, trapped by the storm, by the silence, by fifty years of a life she no longer recognized.

Sleep was impossible. Every creak of the house, every sigh of the wind, was Danny coming for her. She lay in their bed, rigid, feigning sleep, her ears straining in the darkness. He breathed beside her, a slow, steady rhythm that offered no comfort. It was the breathing of a man at peace, a man whose mind was made up. She thought about escape. But how? The storm still raged, less violent now, but a constant, scouring presence. The truck wouldn't start in this cold, she knew it. The battery would be dead. Even if it did, the long, winding driveway would be an impassable landscape of ice and snowdrifts. Walking was out of the question. Without her parka, she wouldn't last a mile. He had thought of that. He had systematically removed her every option. She was a prisoner. Sometime in the small, black hours before dawn, she must have drifted off, because she was jolted awake by a change in the sound of the house. It was silence. The wind had stopped. The relentless moaning and shrieking that had been her constant companion for days was gone. The resulting quiet was so profound it felt like a physical pressure against her eardrums. She lay perfectly still, listening. Then she heard it. A soft click. The sound of the bedroom door latch. She squeezed her eyes shut, her heart pounding a frantic, trapped rhythm against her ribs. She felt the mattress shift as he got out of bed. His footsteps were nearly silent on the wooden floor. She risked opening her eyes a fraction. In the faint, gray light filtering through the iced-over windows, she saw his silhouette moving toward the closet. He dressed in the dark, his movements sure and practiced. He was putting on his heavy outdoor gear. The insulated bibs, the wool jacket. He was going out. Now? In the pre-dawn dark? She watched as he left the room, pulling the door almost closed behind him, leaving just a sliver of an opening. She waited, counting to one hundred, her breath held tight in her chest. Then she slipped out of bed. The floor was freezing against her bare feet. She crept to the door and peered through the crack. The living room was dark, save for the faint, dying orange glow from the hearth. She saw him by the front door, pulling on his heavy boots. He picked up something from the floor. A tool. A long metal bar with a chisel point on the end. An ice spud. He used it to check for weak spots when he used to fish. He unlatched the front door and slipped outside, as silent as a ghost. The door clicked shut behind him. Pauline’s mind raced. Where was he going? To check the ice. To see if it was thick enough yet. For her. The terror was a living thing inside her, clawing at her throat. She had to do something. She couldn't just wait here for him to come back and get her. She pulled on her own clothes, her fingers clumsy and numb. She grabbed the first coat she could find, her thin spring jacket. Useless, but better than nothing. She shoved her bare feet into her unlaced boots. She had to see. She had to know for sure. She opened the door and slipped out after him. The cold was shocking, absolute. The air was perfectly still and razor sharp in her lungs. The world was silent, muffled by the new layer of snow that had fallen after the ice. And the light was beginning to change. The eastern sky was a pale, bruised purple, and it cast the white landscape in an ethereal, otherworldly glow. She saw his tracks in the snow, leading away from the house, down toward the lake. She followed them, her own footsteps a clumsy crunching in the profound silence. She reached the edge of the shore. He was out there. A dark figure, maybe fifty yards out, moving slowly. He would walk a few steps, then stop. He would raise the heavy ice spud and slam it down. Thump. A solid, deep sound. He was testing. Measuring. She watched, hidden in the shadows of the snow-laden pines that lined the shore. He was methodical, working in a grid pattern, moving steadily farther out. Thump. Thump. Thump. The sound echoed across the frozen expanse, the sound of her own doom being measured out. This was it. This was his plan in action. He was finding the right spot. A place that was solid enough to walk on, but close to a weakness. A place where a story could be told. A place where a body could disappear. And in the cold, purple light of the coming dawn, Pauline knew she was watching her own grave being prepared.

The storm broke. Not with a sudden clap of thunder or a dramatic parting of clouds, but with a quiet, gradual surrender. By mid-morning, a weak, watery sunlight filtered through the ice-caked windows, painting pale yellow rectangles on the floor. The world outside, which had been a maelstrom of gray and white, was now blindingly bright, the ice on the trees glittering with a fierce, cold beauty. The change in the weather seemed to work a change in Danny as well. He came inside from his pre-dawn excursion, his face flushed with the cold, but his eyes… his eyes were different. The flat, empty look was gone. He looked tired, old, but he looked like himself again. He saw her standing by the window, her arms wrapped around herself, and he stopped. For the first time in days, he seemed to truly see her. He saw the fear in her eyes, the rigid set of her jaw. 'Pauline,' he said, his voice hesitant. She didn't answer. She couldn't. The words were frozen in her throat. He took a step closer, unzipping his heavy jacket. 'You're scared.' It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact, colored with a dawning horror, as if he were only just now realizing the effect of his behavior. 'I… I haven't been myself,' he stammered, running a hand through his thin, damp hair. 'This storm… being cooped up. It gets to you.' She just stared at him, her silence a wall he had to break through. 'The ice,' he said, his voice dropping. 'I've been worried about the ice.' 'I know,' she said, and her voice was a thin, brittle thing. 'You said. Not thick enough.' He winced, as if her words had physically struck him. 'No, that's not… I didn't mean it like that.' He slumped into his armchair, the one he had kept his silent vigil in, and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders shook. For a wild moment, she thought he was crying. 'It's Henderson's snowmobile,' he said, his voice muffled by his hands. 'What?' The word was a sharp, disbelieving bark. 'Bill Henderson. His new Ski-Doo. The big one he bought this fall. His grandson was riding it last week, before the storm really set in. Took it too close to the inlet where the creek runs. Went right through.' Pauline vaguely remembered hearing something about it. A foolish accident. No one was hurt, but the machine was lost. 'He's a good man, Bill,' Danny continued, looking up at her now, his eyes pleading for understanding. 'His wife, Mary, she called here the first day of the storm, hysterical. Bill's heart isn't good. He spent his whole retirement savings on that thing. He's devastated. Ashamed.' He took a deep breath. 'I saw the spot. Where it went in. I could see the track marks from the shore before the snow covered them. And I got this idea in my head. A stupid idea.' He gestured around the room, at the fireplace, at the sharpened fishing gear now sitting neatly in its box. 'If the ice got thick enough… real thick… I could take the winch from the truck, some planks… maybe drag it out for him. I kept thinking about it. Couldn't sleep. Just turning it over and over. I didn't want you going out there, near that spot. It's not safe. That's why I moved your coat. I didn't want you to even think about going for a walk. And the phone… Mary kept calling, crying about the insurance not covering it. I couldn't listen to it anymore. So I unplugged it. It was stupid. All of it. I was just… fixated.' He looked at her, and his eyes were filled with a deep, weary shame. 'I was just trying to solve a problem, Polly. I got lost in it. I'm sorry. I never meant to scare you.'

Relief. It washed over her in a dizzying, sickening wave. It was so potent, so absolute, it made her feel weak. Her knees buckled and she had to grip the back of a chair to steady herself. A snowmobile. A neighbor's submerged snowmobile. Not her. It wasn't about her. The sharpened hooks weren't for her. The disconnected phone wasn't to silence her screams. The frozen coat wasn't to trap her. It was all just… Danny. Her Danny. A man who got an idea in his head and couldn't let it go until he had worried it from every possible angle. A man who would obsess over a neighbor's foolish mistake, who would take on the weight of another's misfortune as his own. The man she had married. Not a monster. Not a murderer. Just a stubborn, foolish, kind-hearted old man. Laughter bubbled up in her throat, a hysterical, tear-filled sound. She laughed until she cried, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. The tension of the last three days drained out of her, leaving her feeling hollowed out, exhausted, and incredibly, indescribably foolish. He stood up and came to her, wrapping his arms around her. He felt solid and warm. Familiar. 'I'm so sorry, Polly,' he whispered into her hair. 'I'm an old fool.' 'Yes, you are,' she sobbed into his shoulder. 'You are an old fool.' They stood there for a long time, clinging to each other in the pale winter sunlight. The house was just a house again. The ice was just ice. The fear, the terrible, suffocating certainty that had consumed her, was just a bad dream, a phantom conjured by the storm and the silence. Later, they went outside together. The air was clean and cold, the silence peaceful. The world sparkled. It was beautiful. He showed her the gear he'd been preparing to use for his ridiculous, heroic plan. Ropes, a come-along, the sharpened gaff hook to try and snag a ski handle. It all made a strange, perfect sense now. It was all so… Danny. They walked back toward the house, their arms linked, their boots crunching in the snow. The terrible intimacy of her fear was already receding, replaced by the comfortable, worn intimacy of their fifty years together. She felt reborn. As they reached the porch, she leaned against the railing for a moment, taking a deep breath of the cold, clean air, letting the last of the shadows disperse in the brilliant light. Her eyes drifted along the cabin wall, half-buried in a drift of snow that had blown up against the foundation. And then she saw it. Leaning against the logs, almost hidden from view, was a heavy, cast-iron boat anchor. It was the old one from the fishing boat they'd sold a decade ago. It was dark with rust, its flukes sharp and cruel-looking. A length of thick, rusted chain was coiled at its base. It wasn't part of the snowmobile recovery gear. It had no purpose here, no reason to have been pulled from the shed where it had sat, forgotten, for years. It had no business being there, and its dark, solid weight on the snow felt like a promise.