I didn’t roll my eyes, nor did I express any sort of wonder. He didn’t seem surprised.

My father coughed and we stopped and sat on another bench so he could catch his breath. I asked him if he was sick and he said he was infected with some sort of fungus in his liver but he was taking a natural protocol to heal himself. I didn’t ask him what the protocol was.

“Why do you think she fell?” is what I asked.

My husband had said the same thing as my father did — Morgaine simply got too close to the edge, as children will do. Morgaine was playing bird in the wrong location. Nothing more.

And she should have been supervised by adults, my husband had repeated over and over.

My father had named the old bench after her. Morgaine’s Bench. So people could sit there and remember her.

“I have a lot of regrets,” I told my father.

He said people can’t live with regret. It poisons them. Everyone makes mistakes. We have to carry onward. Ocean said we were all sojourners here on the earth. Each one of us is a wayfarer.

My mother had frightened us into staying away from the cliff, my father said. He had thought about it for years, and if she had not frightened us we would have had a natural caution and care. Morgaine would have taken instinctual precautions and she never would have followed a bird into the fog. He was quiet and then said neither Morgaine nor I had ever learned the right way to understand fairy tales.

But I don’t think this is true.

I’d talked with my husband about how Morgaine had held my hand and how we did not take the twisting path through the pines my father had created. She’d led me straight on her own path and I was disoriented with the blindfold. Her path led straight to the disintegrating precipice.

In civil engineering we talk about the paths of desire that pedestrians take. People wear down pathways through grass when they take shortcuts, veering away from sidewalks for the most direct routes to their destinations. The desire lines. It’s instinctive, this desire to take the most expedient path, not the prescribed one. Planners learn from these behaviours and try to design better pathways accordingly. Sometimes we even wait and see exactly where people have trampled the grass down, to determine the best places to lay walking paths, or the places we need to erect signs and barriers to keep people from veering off the official route. I’ve never forgotten the path through the meadow or the path through the woods my father believed no one would ever bypass, his belief that none of his children would deviate from his sacred trail.

My father said he had always been afraid of heights. It’s why he had never put any sort of trail or staircase down to the beach. It’s why he had a winding path through the trees, so he could compose himself before coming to that crazy plummet at the edge of the woods. Living in the tree house, which was really just a house with several stories, was as much as he could manage. He wasn’t into extreme sports, he said. He didn’t know how to rappel. There was nothing he could have done anyway, after she hit her head on the rocks. And the tide was in, so she would have drowned before they could reach her. Spirits choose how long they will inhabit the vessel we call a body. It’s just harder for us to accept that what we see as children are spirit forms in human flesh. She had already transitioned into the great energy plain when they found her. We create our reality, Ocean said, even as children.