I hid my smile. “It never freezes solid, that depth of water. Just the surface.”

Irritably she asked: “Well, can you walk on it?”

“We’ve got something called an auger to drill down and check how thick the ice is. We say six inches, minimum. Some people say four. If it’s blue ice.”

“Blue ice is frozen shit,” said Alison, “that leaks out of airplanes.”

“Blue ice,” said Robin, “is when the ice is compressed without a lot of air bubbles trapped in it. It’s stronger than white ice.”

“Have you ever been to a lake in winter before?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I want to walk on it.”

“Robin goes out on the ice no matter what.”

“A lot of people say three is safe,” he said.

“It depends on the conditions,” I told Alison.

“I know that!” Robin said sharply. “I’m the country boy, remember?”

Since our confrontation, he’d maintained the air of a wounded animal whose patience was not to be tested. He did not respond to my overtures and offered none of his own. My illness had left me scoured out and meek; I did not want to clarify what had gone on between us.

“Sometimes the ice cracks under your foot,” I said.

“There are thicker and thinner areas,” said Robin. “You can always jump to a stronger part of the ice.”

“What he means is, he’s gotten away with it so far. He loves to scare us.”

Long loaves of snow sat on the caretaker’s porch railings and a round one on each gate pillar. “We never used to come at Christmas,” I told Alison as we drove through. “When my father built the place, it wasn’t even winterized. The caretaker plows the shore road. We pay him to keep our driveway clear.” The roadside gullies were filled to the brim with snow, stippled by the stalks of dead ferns. Two big banks marked the turn into our lot. “This is it. We’re here!”

A kink in the drive kept the house hidden until the last minute, and as it curved into view, I had a flash of astonishment that the place was still there, the two-step back porch, the chalet roof with its burden of white, the sunken stillness of the frozen lake beyond, that all this had not vanished too.