Guerneville is a little over sixty-five miles northwest of Mill Valley. Allowing for some traffic, it would take me about an hour and fifteen minutes to get there. My plan was to drive up that morning, hike around a bit, have my memorial for Sam, play a little guitar, and be home by dinnertime.

Before I headed out, I wrote a list of all the things I missed about Sam on a Glacier National Park postcard I found in my backpack. I’d purchased the card before Bob died, thinking I might send it to him, but of course I never did.

At first I imagined leaving the postcard at the foot of Colonel Armstrong, but for all intents and purposes, that was littering, and I resolved to burn it instead. I shoved it between the pages of the book I was reading and headed out to my truck, lugging my Martin, my backpack, and my coffee thermos, which I was going to fill up at Equator when I stopped to grab breakfast on my way out of town.

Over a month had passed since Sorrow ended, and I had neither seen nor heard from October. And not for lack of trying. I wandered around Marin more than necessary, frequenting all the places I knew she visited. I went to the farmers’ market in San Rafael three Sundays in a row. I hiked the fire road behind Casa Diez a couple times a week. I even drove to YogaWorks one Monday night, right about the time the 6:00 class she used to go to was letting out, even though there was nothing around YogaWorks I could pretend I was doing if I did run into her.

My last attempt at contact had been to mail her a manila envelope containing copies of the drawings I’d done of my light sculpture, with a short note explaining the piece.

She didn’t respond.

The weather app on my phone said the high temperature in Guerneville was fifty-three degrees, and before I left I threw on my fleece pullover, overkill in Mill Valley, which was unusually balmy that morning, but it would be necessary under the shade of the redwoods.

When I got down to town, I parked in the lot behind Mill Valley Market and ran in to get matches, a newspaper, and some wood to start a proper fire at the picnic site. I had some incense too, and planned on burning it with the postcard as an offering to Sam.

I took the bag of supplies back to my truck, dropped it on the seat, grabbed my thermos and the book I was reading—a weird memoir about a man who had moved from Manhattan to the Rocky Mountains to follow his lifelong dream of raising alpacas—and walked the two blocks to Equator.