I lost myself in daydream for a while, trying to keep my feet steady on the slippery path down to the river. The moon gave me a decent amount of light to see by and as I made my way towards the river I noticed that winter was beginning to steal across the woods. It was a sensation more than anything – an intuition that the trees were preparing for change. I caught it in the whispers of the softly moving branches; a crispness, a rustling, the way old people’s voices can take on a new, more mortal timbre, in their final years. It was as if I could smell the coming of the end; the transformation and death of the remaining leaves which were already turning to mulch and decay beneath my boots.

I heard the river before I saw it. It didn’t roar but it had raised its voice in recent days and the stones that were usually visible from the bridge were now more deeply submerged. I wondered about the Popping Stone. The Kissing Bush. I wanted to shake my head dismissively at such superstitious nonsense but I’d altered in some inexplicable way over the past couple of days and I suddenly felt less inclined to dismiss such things as the preserve of the uneducated. I found myself willing to listen. To open my mind a little. I wish I’d done so before. The hope of Heaven would have been comforting when Stefan died.

There was a light on the far side of the river. I glimpsed it through the trees and stopped where I stood. It was a soft kind of radiance; little more than a flash of colour amid the khaki and black but it was enough to catch my eye and cause me a moment’s pause. I strained my hearing, listening for voices, but could make nothing out. Where was the light coming from? I tried to get my bearings. The bridge would take me to the footpath that would lead up the slope to the spa. The light was coming from a little further away, downriver, in the part of the forest that I had rarely investigated. There had been houses there, at one time. Little cottages, inhabited by the artisans who made money from the tourists, selling their wares from carts and barrows along the footpath. What was the name? Green something. Green Grove, that was it. The authorities had started dismantling the little cottages a decade back and only a couple remained; blocky, miserable affairs covered in ivy and littered with mud and leaves.

Quietly, my feet making no noise on the wooden planks of the bridge, I crossed the river and headed away from the footpath. Cautiously, I made my way through the trees towards the light.