Nevertheless, she makes up the bed. All the love she feels for her husband, that cannot go anywhere, she channels into selecting the guest towels. Her dismay, she folds and piles neatly on top of the blanket box. Overwhelming fear, where can that go but into the careful positioning of a fish-shaped guest soap on the unused sink in the en suite bathroom. She dusts the ceramic with a folded square of toilet paper. And in the guest bedroom, a single tear spots the bedspread before being folded back on itself, the ocean it escaped dammed up by the small acts of decency she would gladly give anyone but her husband’s future lover.

‌Trees

Now Logan has company in the forest. Gabrielle, hair still wet from his shower, in a grape-coloured Afghan coat. The dog pads ahead of them, dragging its ears over mud.

Your dog is okay by the road? she asks.

Achilles! he calls.

She laughs.

What?

I like the name. Your joke?

Yes. My wife’s dog. My joke.

Go on, says Gabrielle, give the command.

He glances at her.

I can’t, he says. My wife did the training. She won’t listen to me.

Your wife?

The dog.

Achilles is a she?

I thought we were getting a boy dog, he says. And I liked the name.

Achilles detects their usual path and switches onto it, pulled by the electricity in her nose. October has stripped the canopy above them, exposing them to a shocking blue sky. Only nine on a Saturday morning, and already the smell of bonfires. Gabrielle, in Jules’s borrowed wellies, kicks at the leaves.

She seems very nice. Jules.

Nice. A word his English teacher, Miss McAlpine, banned.

She is very nice.

The cloud of his words condenses, evaporates.

How long have you been married?

A while. He reads a flicker of emotion in her face, and softens his voice a notch. I’d rather talk about you. How did you get into this? Consciousness studies.

Ah. She laughs. The sense of being stared at.

He instinctively glances about them. They are alone.

Explain?

Gabrielle lunges for a stick that is resting against a tree trunk, as if she were afraid he might snatch it first. She was not an only child, he concludes, had at least one brother. Rather than use the stick staff-wise, she drags it behind her like a stiff tail.