“I was the same way, first couple weeks up here. I still only venture out when I feel the need, and I don’t often feel the need.”

We follow the shoreline, walking side by side, me nearer the water. Not too close. No risk of accidental hand touch. We walk in silence for quite a while, and then she finally glances at me.

“So who’s gonna go first?” she asks, a wry grin on her face.

I laugh. “I guess I will, since you came up with the icebreaker.”

I lift a branch up and out of the way, and she ducks under it; here, the shoreline grazes the tree line, so the pine tree branches hang out over the water, forcing us further into the trees.

“My wife died in a car accident three and a half years ago.” I rarely come right out and say it like that. “And it hurts as much now as it did a month afterward.” I pause. “But maybe that’s just because I never really dealt with it.”

She trips on a root, and I catch her by the arm. “Thanks,” she says, recovering. “My husband died. A year ago on the day I arrived.” She pauses, crouches to run her finger in some deep tracks in the dirt. “Bear, I think.”

I glance at it. “Yeah, I’d say so. Big one, too.”

“For me, some days, it hurts more now than it did then,” she says, straightening and brushes her hands together. “As if it’s…fermented, somehow.”

I nod. “I get that.”

We’re on the far side of the lake, now, and we move through the trees to the water’s edge—we can see the cabins, windows gleaming in the late afternoon sun. The docks, dark fingers out into the water. Just the two of them, side-by-side, alone out there.

Behind us, a hill rises, the crown obscured by trees.

“Want to see what’s at the top?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Sure. Probably just more trees, though,” she says, laughing.

“We can go back, if you’re bored, or tired.”

She shakes her head. “Sometimes, boredom is good, and so is being tired. But anyway, I’m not bored. I’ve just never been an outdoorsy kind of girl. Much to my dad’s annoyance, since he was a fisherman and hunter and hiker and camper and all that. I just never liked it. Bugs, dirt, wild animals, weird noises, and did I mention bugs.” She pauses as we wind around a dense cluster of trees, the grade steep up here. “This is nice, though. I’m enjoying it.”