I didn’t mind. I sort of liked the feeling. ‘You don’t have to keep saying sorry.’

June looked at me, eyes wide, as if she hadn’t even realized. Softened. ‘I apologize,’ she joked.

The Styx was a river in its own right, but only really a tributary that flowed into the larger Ohio River to the east. At its thinnest, it was hardly a creek here; at its widest, it was maybe ten long paces across, and deep. I guess it was named because the area was a bit depressing; a lot of the land on either side of the river was swamp. Mud. Quicksand.

We crept along the trail, which was hardly defined, the snow blurring the landscape into one uninterrupted sheet of white. Thick-trunked sycamores loomed over us, their placement messy; the trail had been carved to weave through the grove, so as not to disturb it. This was their home.

I had trouble reconciling my surroundings with the knowledge that this was my River Styx. Ours. It still was, just in different clothes. I wondered whether I was touching spots on the ground where Dad’s footsteps had been, or if the trees remembered us, had heard our conversations, and maybe if you’d cut them down all the ghosts of what we were could fly out, out, out. Not that I loved the thought of Dad being trapped somewhere but I guessed there were worse places than in the trees.

He sort of was. There was a divergence in the path; the left, I remembered, twisted towards the swamp, and the right went towards the river. But an aspen sat directly at the fork where the two trails converged. I knew this one. I cleared the snow round its roots, the cold pinching the skin between my fingers; he was there.

Aspens were easy to carve. The bark was soft and malleable, just the sort that an eight-year-old might be able to slice away at with a particularly sharp branch.

I had seen people whittling their initials into trees on TV, apparently. At the time, I hadn’t realized the gesture was pretty much exclusively romantic. I’d inscribed ‘S+D’ into the tree – Sydney and Dad – sloppily enough that they barely registered as letters and almost looked like natural grooves in the bark; you had to know where to look to even see them at all.

Is this all there is?

I traced the letters with the tips of my fingers, aware that June was behind me, but not really registering that she was watching. ‘Oh, Sydney,’ she said, understanding.

You’re OK.