Padgett doesn’t say anything. This is the closest her husband has come to talking about this story canopied over him, of his hated wife, her terrible death. Most hospital scrubs, she thinks, are blue. Aren’t they? And from behind them, before anyone can say something, she hears her name, from the only other couple in the park.

Padgett called Rachel and Ben because she knew they’d show. The Nickels are solid friends, their corresponding trails—children at school, departments at work, neighborhoods and concerns—like stones that have become a road to someplace. Marriage too; they haven’t split up and regard each other not as mirror images but as some basis for comparison, the way a hat, spotted fallen and trampled on the ground, will make you check your head for yours. They hello all around. “You look good,” Ben says, to both of them, a compliment and a faint joke. “What’s your secret?”

“I walked out of your wedding,” Padgett says, but the laugh is small. They’ve all figured this out ages ago. In every wedding, it’s been cracked, is the makings of another, but that’s, like the story they know, not accurate really. Vic wasn’t there then. He’s just here now.

“No kids?” Padgett asks.

“Soccer,” Rachel says ruefully, and then, wind in the trees, a reminder, maybe, that it’s a solemn occasion. “You OK?” Rachel asks Vic, a little strangely, she and Vic the farthest points away in their four-cornered drawing. Padgett doesn’t say anything. Vic holds up the box. For a minute, from a distance, it likely looks like a box of pastries, that the four of them are picnicking in the gloom, and when the pairs pair up, the men are in no time some fifty, then more, then a hundred yards ahead, out of earshot, in close conference.

Not so many years ago, a photo of these husbands, taken from where the wives are standing, would have led to wild screened speculation. Were they ending the forest? Were they tearing down Bottle Grove? Buying the Masonic temple? Even then it would have been nonsense. You go so far and no farther. You stop getting drunk, you stop sleeping around, or do it less. You get married, or, married, stay married. You make a go. You’re less frantic, you make yourself be, about your own sex or money. There might be children distracting you, or you’re just, the way houses do in San Francisco neighborhoods built on sand, after any earthquake, settled. You shutter some buildings and walk past them like it’s a story in the paper—BODY FOUND IN PARK WAS FRAUDULENT CLERGYMAN, FINGERPRINTS CONFIRM—you don’t even click on, not anymore. You get out of the forest but you leave it there. Visit and remember, sometimes, yearn for it even. But civilized people, by definition, don’t live in the wild.