The old ladies blamed Elizabeth’s cancer on her lifestyle — the tree planting she did in the clear-cuts high up in northern British Columbia, exposure to some sort of pesticide. If she had stayed in Nova Scotia with a normal job none of it would have happened. They viewed her education as something that had made her vulnerable, a thing which stole her inborn wisdom and replaced it with disease. Elizabeth said it was genetics, an inherited genome triggered by who knows what, a demon lying in wait. At first she was sure she wouldn’t die, but then she knew she would stop breathing in the hospital bed, her lungs full of fluid, the “Get well soon, Mommy” drawings on the wall like posters in a kindergarten class.

Adam doesn’t want to think about Elizabeth’s death throes anymore. He takes a deep breath. “Ladies, we should turn back,” Adam says firmly, rubbing his hands together because he is very cold now. He hears a sound but he isn’t sure what it is, almost like water. Maybe they are closer to the bay than he thought, and it’s been lurking there the entire time and only now the tide is high and the white caps are crashing on the shore. “We really need to turn back before night falls. I need to pick the girls up at the babysitter’s house.”

But Charlotte and Doris carry on as though they don’t hear him. None of this was part of the day’s plan. Adam now worries they’ll be stumbling back in the dark. If the battery dies on his cellphone they won’t even have a flashlight. A hatred for technology fills him, how he’s become so dependent on one small rectangle. Adam fears they’ll go off the path into the woods and then fall into a ravine. Or tumble off a cliff and crash into the bay below. “Look, I really don’t mean to rush you but it’s a work day for me tomorrow. I have to go home. My daughters are waiting for me. I had no idea how long this would take.”

It is almost as though he could hear Elizabeth scoff about his need for a plan. Werner Herzog says storyboards are for cowards. It was why she lived her life from moment to moment, why even with the children she hated a routine. Why she had not gone to the doctor when she first found the lump. His terror at losing his beloved wife has been replaced by a bottomless hole of thick loss.

The sun is lowering quickly. Adam looks at his phone. Still no signal.

And then he sees it — further into the clearing, the remains of the stone foundation of the old house. It’s now full of brown grasses and dwarfed by overgrown lilac bushes along its edges, their decaying blossoms like black spears at the top of the high branches.

“We need to go back.” Adam keeps repeating this, his voice vibrating, the words falling off his dry tongue.