I head into the woods.

There’s no path. I’m not sure if I’m taking exactly the course that journalist and I took all those months ago, but it feels right. It feels familiar. The trees, the thick shadows, the cold breeze all feel the same. The only thing that’s different is Yvonne’s deadweight in my hand. It feels like I’m carrying someone’s body into the woods to bury it. The body of someone I loved.

I walk until I can’t see the Crow’s Nest anymore. It’s dark. Roots and rocks slide under my boots, and I stagger. Damn it, I should have brought a flashlight. I pull out my cell phone. The screen gives me a little blob of gray light. Not great, but it will help. There’s no signal out here, I notice. Not a huge surprise. It’s patchy enough all around town.

Following the splotch of light, I head forward. The ground is soggy and soft with all the recent rain. My heels keep sinking in, like the ground is trying to hold me here. I tell myself to stay calm, stay logical, act like an adult, but half of me is ready to crumble. Every sound I catch—chirps and buzzes and creaks and snapping noises in the branches—seems to have some terrible possibility hiding in it. It takes all my energy just to keep walking, not to turn around and bolt back to the car like a kid running out of a scary movie.

I need to finish this. But I can’t dump Yvonne just anywhere. I need to find a place for her that feels right. Finally I stumble into a little clearing where someone must have built a bonfire a long time ago. There’s still a little divot in the ground, with a few logs pulled around it like bench seats. The surrounding trees are pines, tall and sturdy. Their needles whisper.

I stop there.

My fingers clench and unclench on the case’s handle.

I’ve never understood the rock stars who smash their guitars at the end of a set. All those beautiful, expensive, state-of-the-art instruments, smacked into chunks of plastic. It’s such a giant middle finger to every broke music nerd who can’t afford a decent guitar of his own. I’d never hurt Yvonne. I can’t even stand to set her on the ground out here, in the mud and the dew and the rotting leaves.

But I have to.

I have to stop thinking of her as mine. I have to stop thinking of her as Yvonne. I have to stop thinking of her as her. I have to give this back before they can take any more.

God. I don’t think I can do it.

I pick out a spot that seems a little drier, a patch of moss and leaves in the shelter of one huge trunk. I put the case down gently.

And then, even though I’m still telling myself not to do it, I open the clasps and lift the lid.