Had she imagined this moment, Adam the one following them deep into the woods instead of her? She’s his ghost now, this Bethie taunting him about how carefully he lives, how unpredictable the woods can be, how nature can never truly be controlled.

They’d left Toronto for the tenure-track position Elizabeth was offered. Why do you think I work in cultural sociology and media studies? It’s my destiny. I can’t escape where I was raised. Better to study it than have it eat you alive. I’m interested in basic human experience, the elemental core of who we are. She was euphoric about returning to rural Nova Scotia. She said it brought illumination to everyday life. At least they were in the small, cosmopolitan oasis of the university town, a two-hour drive from the redneck county where she grew up, where her family still lived.

The rustle of the leaves beneath their feet form a tiny chorus of mocking voices. Adam had expected it would be slow going, but it’s especially slow because the old ladies don’t walk very quickly. At least he is able to catch his breath. Charlotte keeps stopping to admire the surroundings and the colour of the leaves. “Oh, the sky reminds me of when I was a young girl. Nothing like a late October sky, is there, Doris?”

Doris isn’t interested in the darkening blue sky, now tinged with a bit of gold and mauve. “Charlotte, don’t dawdle like some sort of foreigner. We don’t have all day.”

Charlotte fusses with her angora gloves. “I’m a sentimentalist, I’ll have you know. There’s not enough sentimentality in this world,” she says with an undertone of malice in her voice.

Aunt Doris tries to clear her throat as though something rotten is lodged inside. “There’s nothing practical about sentimentality.” Adam hears the tremble in Doris’s voice. She’s always been so steadfast and resilient. Aunt Doris may have been a clerk who specialized in dealing with idiots, but now Adam sees a frail side emerging. Maybe it was always there and he had never noticed. She had expertly concealed it.

“You can’t scoop up lost time.” Aunt Doris slowly bends over and grabs an armful of paper-thin yellow leaves which immediately spill from her thin arms. She pokes Adam in the ribs with her bony finger and stares at him as though she’s never seen him before. But she says what she always says: “It’s something, having a Chinaman in the family named Adam O’Malley.”

His ancestors came to build the railways across the country in the 1880s. His grandmother married an Irish immigrant, which is why he has dark eyes and auburn hair, why his mother knew how to play Mahjong, which she learned from her neighbours who had moved to Vancouver before Hong Kong was handed back to the Communists.

“How’re your comic books coming along, Adam?”

“Graphic novels, Charlotte.”

He should move back to Vancouver, he knows this. But the children are settled. He promised Elizabeth he would let them grow up here.