February came in grey, and the lake began to give up the ice. It happened the way most things happened at the lake — not as an event but as a patience releasing. First the coves turned dark around their edges, then the long middle followed, the ice going from white to blue to a thing you could see through, until one week the whole surface lay in lanes of black water and the shoreline stood open to the sky. At night the ice spoke as it went — groans, the long tuning of a thing letting go — and Aaron heard it through the open window and did not mind it. Winter, he was learning, left politely if you let it.
"You've got open water the last week of the month," Benjamin said from the porch, nodding at the lake like it was a person he knew. "It knows what it's doing."
"The ice before snow knew too," Aaron said.
"It always does. People are the ones that hurry."
