After more than an hour, we reached a small gap in the trees where you could just make out the river below. It was a force – movement and momentum, eddies and whitecaps – certainly going fast enough for a body to get lost. A frothing, crashing sound rose up and bounced around the valley, angry and forceful yet somehow melodic – white noise.

Around us, colors: burgundy and burnt orange, eggplant and goldenrod, the sort you normally only see in paint chips. Patchwork hills rolling out before us like the quilt that Maggie had given Rachel, the hues dark and brooding where the thick gray clouds blocked the sun, bright and vibrant where they didn’t.

I flinched at a rustle behind me, a sound like someone was following us. ‘Don’t worry, it’s just an animal,’ John said, turning for the first time to look back at me.

‘Sorry, I’m just –’

He shook his head, as if he didn’t need an explanation from me. And of course he didn’t. His face looked as pained as mine was, nervousness crossed with shame, fear – desire? I wanted, suddenly, to touch him, to feel the warmth of his skin.

‘Come on, Lucy,’ Vera said, interrupting my thoughts. She pointed to the clouds overhead. ‘It might rain soon, and we need to keep going.’

‘Yes,’ John said, the look of understanding disappearing from his face. ‘We should keep on.’

It did begin to drizzle, droplets sneaking through the light cover of trees. We walked for another fifteen minutes or so before we passed the hiker who’d signed in ahead of us, an older man with a walking stick, a Vietnam veteran cap, and a bright orange vest. ‘Happy trails, folks,’ the man said, almost aggressively congenial, as his stick, made of some burly knotted wood, dug into the mossy, murky ground, softened by the light rain, penetrating the undergrowth.

We nodded back. ‘You too.’ ‘Take care.’ ‘Careful in the rain.’

Remember the three of us if the police call. Remember it was slippery that day, that the man in front had a camera around his neck.

Another twenty minutes, and the trees had gathered thick and tangled around us. My hair was matted to my forehead from the wet, and there was a sound of tumbling rocks, a squirrel or raccoon crawling through the underbrush, and a smell of decay and rot. More than that, there was the blistering knowledge that John would disappear only a few turns up ahead. That everything that had happened would be left unaddressed.

And that sense, once again, that someone was behind us.