But Jack could also say, You know what, Mia? I’m busy as hell with work. Or I’ve got a killer headache. Could you go play Legos? Give Daddy some space for a bit? And she would. She would take off without complaint for two hours or more, doing her own thing. It felt miraculous compared to the black hole of infancy and toddlerhood. It was great. Mia was a great kid.

Jack felt spoiled by this age, happily accustomed to it, and maybe that’s why he got so irritated when he parked the truck along the edge of the road, slapping the grille through a cluster of ferns, and she said in a trembling whine, “I don’t want to get out.”

Jack killed the engine. The truck wheezed and ticked and then the silence of the forest set in. “What do you mean, you don’t want to get out? You have to get out. I have to work. This is my job.”

No response except a wiggle.

He continued, trying to keep his voice calm. “We talked about this, Mia. You seemed excited then. To help.”

“Yeah, but.” Mia clicked the flashlight off, then on. “I didn’t think it would be like this.”

“Like what?”

She was almost crying. “Like—I don’t know—a freaky fairy-tale forest!”

The Olympic National Forest did look like an illustration from an antique leather-bound book. The old-growth evergreens reached dizzying heights, their trunks as wide as Jack’s truck was long. And everything—the rotting stumps and knuckly boulders—was carpeted with moss. In this, the wettest rain forest in the country, it wasn’t difficult to imagine a gingerbread house tucked into a clearing with a witch peering cruelly out its frosting-rimmed window.

“Why do we have to go in the middle of the night? Why can’t we just come back in the daytime? When there’s—whatever you call it—electric-magnet radiation.”

“Electromagnetic. And we have to look now, because there was a good rain yesterday. Rain is fungi fuel. That’s going to bring out a lot of new growth. And also because this area will be crawling with mushroom hunters by dawn. Those guys are the worst and they’re going to ruin my work. And also because my UV torch picks up mushrooms better than the naked eye, and in the daylight, it won’t—”

“I don’t even know what any of that means!” Mia said, shrieking now.

Usually Jack kept his cool; he rarely lost his temper, but he could feel himself getting close. The early morning and long drive had thinned his nerves. One more whimper from Mia and he would probably start yelling and then she would start crying and then it would take fifteen minutes to calm her down.

“Chill, daddy-o,” he said, and she said, “What?”