“Well, that’s where I marked and cut.” She’d used the tape measure and made a careful line with the metal square and the chunky carpenter’s pencil. “Just like all the others I just did.”

“Maybe you read the tape measure wrong,” he suggested.

“You think I don’t know how to read a tape measure?” she’d snapped.

“No, babe, I’m just—”

“Cut the next one yourself,” she’d said. She hadn’t meant to. This was so un-Helen. She was on edge. Prickly. It was the lack of sleep. The memory of the hideous scream. The tooth and nail, which Nate had taken to calling “our strange gift.”

“Hey,” Nate said, coming up and rubbing her shoulders. “What do you say we call it quits for today. We can go for a little walk. Then I’ll go into town and pick us up a pizza and a bottle of wine. Sound good?”

She’d agreed, apologized for being such a shit, and they’d put away the tools and walked down to the bog. It was a five-minute walk, downhill through the woods. The air was sweet and clean, and the path was layered with a thick carpet of pine needles. It really was beautiful. Along the way Helen spotted delicate, balloon-like oval pink flowers.

“What are those?”

“Lady’s slippers,” Nate said. “They’re a member of the orchid family. But I’ve gotta say, it’s not the foot of a lady I think of when I look at it.”

Helen smiled, leaned down to study one. It was a delicate flower, almost embarrassingly sexual.

“So, I’ve been doing some research, and it turns out Breckenridge Bog isn’t a true bog,” Nate told her. “It’s a fen: a boggy wetland fed by underground springs.”

“A fen,” Helen echoed.

“Yeah, most bogs are just fed by runoff. They have very little oxygen. A fen, on the other hand, has streams and groundwater that give it more oxygen, richer nutrients in the soil and water.”

They got to the bog, which was circled with pine, cedar, and larch trees. There were a few small cedars growing up in the bog itself. The ground was a thick carpet of spongy moss floating on water. There were sedges, low bushes, thick grass that cut their legs as they walked. Their feet were sucked down. It was like walking on a giant sponge.

Everything about this place was wonderful and new, full of magic. “It’s like another planet here,” Helen said, leaning into Nate, who hugged her from behind.

He showed her the pitcher plants with red heart-like flowers and leaves at the bottom shaped like little pitchers.

“They’re carnivorous,” he said. “Bugs are drawn into the pitcher and they drown in the water there, then the plant digests them.”

“Why don’t they just crawl out?”