The rain started as a whisper, a soft pattering on the skylight above the kitchen island, and I remember thinking, Good, we'll have a lazy day. I was so wrong. It was the silence that first clued me in. The kind of deep, unnatural quiet that falls over a house when the resident four-legged chaos engine has found a project. I'd been staring at my laptop for two hours, the screen a blur of spreadsheets and emails, while Cooper, my ninety-pound lump of golden fur, had been a perfect gentleman. He'd sighed dramatically from his bed in the corner, thumped his tail twice as a sign of protest, and then… nothing. I called his name, the sound swallowed by the steady drumming of water against the roof. No jingle of his collar. No frantic skitter of claws on the hardwood. Just the rain, and that dreadful, pregnant silence. I found him in the living room, sitting in the middle of the rug like a sphinx, his head cocked. He wasn't destroying anything, which was a relief, but the ...