Adam feels guilty for being suspicious of the elderly woman, but he has a bad feeling in his stomach. There is something behind the storyboard he doesn’t want to face. With the grid falling apart and his ability to structure his time and order his thoughts unreliable, he feels vulnerable, like whatever is hiding might leap out and he wouldn’t even see it coming.

“Turn here, Adam dear,” Grandma Charlotte says. “Bethie knew the way. She was such a good girl. She understood we needed to pay our respects, keep our connection to the past.”

Adam feels a rush of rage thinking of how his wife never told him the truth about this annual excursion. Shame pushes the rage down. He always thought Elizabeth was embarrassed by her rough country upbringing, which explained why she didn’t talk about it. Until he met her family, Adam had never heard anyone call her Beth, let alone “Bethie.” She said her friends called her Elizabeth but her family would never surrender her childhood nickname. At least she had a name which allowed for that multiplicity of identities, Elizabeth had joked. She was always joking. Adam is filled with longing for her, how easily she navigated change and uncertainty. At the same time it hits Adam that maybe Elizabeth didn’t talk much about her childhood because she was protecting him from it, not hiding her embarrassment.

Grandma Charlotte taps Adam on the shoulder. “Pull over right here, dear,” she says.

He jumps. He’s been as lost in his thoughts as on the road.

“Stop right now, Adam, I said,” Charlotte yells. “What are you, deaf?”

Adam slams on the brakes. Not seeing a turnoff, he pulls over to the side of the road, Charlotte looking through the rear window as though she is expecting someone to greet them. But there is only impenetrable forest. Adam doesn’t see a driveway, a mailbox, or even a marker — nothing but coloured trees.

He follows the women out of the car, Charlotte continuing to insist this is the right spot. Doris parts the branches and, sure enough, there is a trail, which may once upon a time have been a road. Doris flaps her hand over her shoulder. “It’s hard to believe if you walk just a few miles that way you’ll come to the Bay of Fundy. You’d never even know it was there for all the woods in between.”

The air smells brown-sugar sweet, the pale sun softly illuminating the last of the purple asters. He and Elizabeth had named their youngest daughter for those flowers, Elizabeth’s favourite. Adam tries but fails to summon the Pantone for the blossoms. The paper-thin leaves on the tree branches rustle in the breeze — now just orange, red, and yellow to him. Some have fallen but many still cling to the branches, though it strikes him that it might be the other way around — trees clinging to their cover of leaves, hiding something behind the brilliant colours.