“This road’s bound to be muddy,” she said. “When’s the last time you drove a four-by-four, Burke?”

A pause. “Been a while.”

“Exactly. Anyway, I’m sick of being chauffeured. Your turn.” She hooked her thumb. “Out.”

Burke smiled a little bit and did what she said. He went around to the passenger side and made himself comfortable while she adjusted the seat and the steering wheel.

“Right,” she said, shifting back into gear. “So how far up this road are we headed?”

“Past the big clear-cut” was Burke’s only input, then up a side road. Jess set the trip monitor anyway, watched the miles count up. The road was in decent shape, actually; it had been graded recently and didn’t show signs of too many washouts. She made good time, encountered no other drivers. Found the front of the clear-cut within five miles and the back end another mile past, a spur road heading up into the bush just beyond it.

“Must be up this way,” she said, and Burke grunted in agreement like the world’s most stoic GPS. She turned the wheel and pressed the gas.

The road got shitty real fast from there. It could hardly be called a road, more a pair of twin trails through the brush. The woods got denser, encroaching on all sides, and winter runoff gutted the tracks, sending the Blazer yawing this way and that, forcing Jess to take things extra slow.

Five minutes of this and Lucy crawled over the center console and into the front seat, dropping herself unceremoniously into Burke’s lap. She exhaled a long, put-upon sigh and stuck her nose in the gap between the seat and the passenger door.

Burke groaned. “Dang, you’re a heavy dog,” he said, but when Jess glanced over, she could see he was smiling. He had his arms around her, stroking her flank.

“She’s a big, fat baby, all right,” Jess said. “If you weren’t in the truck, she’d be crawling on my lap.”

It took twenty minutes of climbing on that muddy trail before the land leveled out and the grade eased off. Jess guessed if the overgrowth weren’t so dense, you could probably look out and see Deception Cove and the water, but as it was, you could barely see sky, much less make out where you stood in the grand scheme of things.

Whatever this road had been used for, the rain forest had reclaimed all but the bare basics. Tall pines and Douglas firs, western red cedar, spruce, deadfall draped with lush carpets of moss, ferns of all variations. This was a primeval place; it was quiet here, it was wet, and it was alive. This was what she’d missed when she was overseas. Even after she’d quit missing Ty and quit missing her town, the rain forest had kept her homesick, and Jess imagined it always would.