‘Don’t go too far,’ he calls after Gaia.

She skips into the trees. ‘OK, Daddy, I won’t.’

He promised the girls a picnic in the woods – a bear’s picnic, which sounds much more ominous now that they’re in actual bear territory – and so he lays out a groundsheet in a dry part of the clearing and sets Coco down on a seat pad while he unpacks his flask of tea and pasta salad, along with a box of blueberry muffins for the girls. There’s no rational explanation for why this most banal of tasks – pouring the tea into a sippy cup for Coco, peeling the edges off Gaia’s sandwich so she doesn’t complain about it later – should suddenly have him in tears, but there it is. He weeps silently as he prepares lunch, glad that Gaia isn’t here to ask him why he’s crying. Is it because of Mumma? Yes, he thinks. Yes. I’m crying because the river has been restored to life and yet my wife remains dead. Why couldn’t it be the other way round?

The raw reality of Aurelia’s death is a maw he steps into again and again. All her clothes, perfumes, soaps, and shoes are still in her closet, untouched. Books she read, notebooks holding her writing. He keeps her phone charged, watches videos of her. Listens to her voice recordings, compulsively checks her Instagram account for updates, and each time he sees that the account has stalled at that last haunting image of fir trees whitened with snow, his heart lurches. She is dead – actually, stunningly, dead. How can that be?

He keeps looking for a map of some kind to navigate this alien terrain, help him find a way out of the nightmare. Grief is made of trapdoors, each moment plunging you into a memory. That his wife is dead is one thing, that she died in such a harrowing, inexplicable manner is another. That phone call. We’ve found a body part. We suspect it belonged to Aurelia. And then, the morning he had to drive to a morgue alone and identify her body. No, not her body – a carcass. Bloated, broken, and waxy from time in the water, picked at by animals before a farmer found her.

The ground still shifts beneath his feet when he thinks about it. And yet he hasn’t told anyone about how she was found. Not her family, not his. How could he speak of such a thing? How could he ever begin to scale such horror with mere words?