He still saw her at the co-op from time to time, carrying a thin bunch of organic carrots to the checkout or trailing a pale hand along the granola bins. Once as he moved past her she whispered something so obscene and ungrammatical it stayed in his head for days.

It was right around then that he ended up with Aiko, who for all her difficulties had thrown up in front of him just one time, the front third of a bucktoothed underground creature that wasn’t part of the catch-and-release program. And not that it was anyone’s business, but he and the dog slept together easily, on their backs, with a foot of gritty sheet between them.

In the early evening Stephen would trade one lab for another; leaving his experiments percolating, he would race home to get Aiko out of the yard and then drive back up the hill, where they took long contemplative walks alongside the creeks and through the gorges of the Cornell campus. Following her on the leash was no more possible than holding on to the bumper of a departing car; he went from that to a sixteen-foot rope wrapped around his right hand and pulled taut as a guy wire. With Nathan’s one-word texted blessing (Whatever), he decided to let her run free. That first time, they sat in the cab of his truck for three minutes, Stephen laying down the law while Aiko stared straight ahead through the windshield. “And I mean it, you come when you’re called, Aiko. Aiko, come,” he practiced. She refused to look in his direction even when he tugged her head around to face him.

He opened the driver’s door and she was overtop of him and gone before he could do anything but clutch his gonads. While he sat in the truck trying to think what to do, she came barreling back into view, stopped short, ears lifted up off her head, and crouched with her rump in the air. When he got out, she tore off again, returning as he rounded the first bend.

He liked to walk along, those evenings, thinking idly about science or sex, the joy of the bounding dog infecting his own life. It all seemed good, the experiments sputtering and dying in the petri dishes, the other experiments that yielded results his graduate students would carefully pen into notebooks, the muted pint-size grandeur of the Ithaca landscape with its plummeting overlooks, hanging bridges, and moody, hopeless skies.

It was a long way from California, the place he considered home, where they had moved him in the summer between fifth and sixth grade and where he was miraculously reborn as just another kid with a banana-seat bike. He went to a big California high school where everyone had a gimmick; his was that he was exceptionally smart. People called him Steve, without italics.