June parked the car, the sudden stop jolting both of us backwards. I felt her eyes on me while I sat there, doing nothing. It seemed like I was doing a lot of that these days.

I was back, and nothing was the same.

‘I’m sorry,’ June finally said. ‘This was a stupid idea. I should have asked you first. I’m sorry. You hate it. I just thought, maybe if you came here again, if you saw it, then we could – I don’t know. I don’t actually know what I was thinking. This was stupid. I’m so, so sorry. Let’s just go to Heath’s.’

‘No,’ I said too quickly, like every time she threatened to leave and I said no, no, no. Maybe it had been stupid of her. I hadn’t decided yet. But I didn’t care. ‘I want to see it. Let’s go.’

‘Are you sure? I’m so sorry, I –’

‘Yeah. Uh, yeah. Come on. It’s OK.’ I was taken aback by the sheer force of her apology; I turned to examine her. ‘Are you OK?’

I swore I saw her blink back tears. ‘Yeah.’

Car doors slammed.

I eyed up the entrance, two flimsy-looking fence gates, and worried. That I’d see his ghost. That maybe we’d crossed planes and were glaring down the entrance to the actual river to hell instead of an admittedly unimpressive excuse for a river with a melodramatic name.

‘We don’t have to, like, stay for long,’ June said. ‘It’s chilly, anyways. And the sun’s gonna set.’

‘Yeah, no, we probably shouldn’t stay after dark. There’s this, uh, path that goes in a circle. Over the river. It would only take a half-hour or so. I don’t know. Maybe more with the snow, but we don’t have to do the whole thing.’

‘Yeah, OK. Let’s do that.’

She was doing it again. Injecting herself into places that weren’t hers. She stood in the spots where Dad stood, slipped herself into his silhouettes and made them dance again. The faded wooden map. The unassuming path. This was mine and his. And now June was here. And I guess I wasn’t upset about it, somehow. Maybe because the path was almost unrecognizable in the snow, without the trill of evening cicadas or the sizzle of July sun.

We walked slowly, me in the lead, keeping guard, almost, as if something was going to leap out, as if this was actually a dream and the world was green, not white, and Dad was just a few steps ahead. You fell asleep, I imagined him saying. It was all a bad dream.

We quickly realized that walking along a snow-covered trail without boots would prove difficult; the cold leaked through my shoes and numbed my feet. ‘Sorry,’ June said. ‘I guess I didn’t really consider the, like, logistics of it.’