Red and Anouk arrived now to a very different place, maple trees green and summer-lush, ferns and shrubs knee-high from the forest floor. Sun reflected off the red tin roof of the sugar shack and the wood shelter that leaned next to it, which housed cords of neatly stacked firewood for the spring boiling.

Inside the shack, there was no one around, but the stainless-steel evaporator vats were a presence; cold and empty, waiting on top of ovens for the next sugaring season. Along the walls, shelves of glass bottles, amber-brown and golden. The cedar-plank walls preserved the smells of maple sugar reduction and smoke. This was not one of those mass-commercial outfits, where the sap was piped right from the trees into a network of machinery. Here, buckets were carried by hand from the trees to the shack. Wood was burned.

‘You want dark or light?’ Red asked. ‘Or should we just get both?’ He held up two bottles.

‘Both.’

Fraser came in then from a door at the back. Denim overalls, bright-yellow T-shirt. He wore heavy boots and his burly arms, hairy and bare, were loaded with cardboard boxes. With a peach wedged between his teeth, juice on his chin, he regarded them with a waggle of his bushy eyebrows. He settled the boxes on a counter and took the peach out of his mouth, gently cuffed Anouk across the top of her head. ‘You’ve grown,’ he said to her. He looked at Red. ‘I always hated when adults said that to me, like it’s some big fucken surprise. But,’ he turned back to Anouk, ‘you have. Grown. You’ve gone from scrawny to not as scrawny.’ He tapped the bottle of darker syrup in Red’s hand. ‘That one you eat over ice cream.’

‘I can’t eat ice cream,’ said Anouk. ‘It goes right through me.’

‘Because of her medications,’ said Red.

Fraser blew out his cheeks, shrugged. He sucked the last of the orange-yellow flesh off the peach pit and tossed the pit out the door. He looked at Red. ‘Anything else you wanted?’

Red scratched his beard. Glanced at Anouk. ‘Ah,’ he said.

‘Come out back,’ said Fraser.

Anouk had seen this act before. They would be gone for a few minutes and when her father came back, he would stink of pot.

‘Yep, yes. Okay.’

Now alone, Anouk checked out her reflection in one of the steel vats, moving from side to side so she was either thin as a whippet, collapsing into herself and disappearing, or wide as a house. Stretched and blurred. Eyes like peach pits. Soon bored, she went outside and kicked around in the dirt a little, picked at an amber crust of dried sap running down the scaly trunk of a white pine.

Red and Fraser came back around the side of the sugar shack, smelling like skunks. Anouk tried not to laugh when her father came close to her, thinking he’d gotten away with something, but she did laugh, so deep and good that it tickled her in the wrong spot and set off a coughing fit. She held on to the tree, doubled over, consumed.