Saskia Deneault had packed too much lunch.

She knew this before she reached Saint-Jérôme, while the city still clung to the highway in strips of gas stations, storage units, tire places, and squat restaurants with laminated specials taped crooked in the windows. The cooler bag sat on the passenger seat beside her, sweating faintly through its canvas. Two sandwiches, boiled eggs, almonds, cheese, an apple, trail mix she did not want, and a thermos of coffee that had gone bitter before Laval.

She had packed like someone responsible for a group.

There was no group.

At the last light before the highway loosened north, she took one hand off the wheel and shoved the cooler bag into the footwell, where it knocked against her daypack and made a stupid heavy sound.

“Fine,” she said.

The word filled the car in Michel’s voice before she could stop it.

You’ll be fine.

He had said it in the lawyer’s parking lot three weeks ago, standing beside his leased grey SUV with his coat unbuttoned and his face arranged into kindness. She would have preferred relief. Relief would at least have been honest. He had looked at her with that careful warmth people used around a capable woman who had finally done something inconvenient, and he had said, “You’ll be fine,” as if fine were a compliment.

Saskia had nodded. She had been wearing black jeans, a clean white shirt, and boots he had once called severe. Her hair had been tucked behind one ear. She had not cried. She had not touched his arm. She had not told him that she had spent the previous night sleeping badly on the far edge of the bed they no longer shared, listening to the pipes tick in the wall of the little house she had kept because she had made the mortgage numbers work first.

“Toi aussi,” she had said.

It had been the correct thing. Small. Mature. Efficient.

You too. Congratulations to both. Incident closed.

A transport truck passed her now, throwing a wet slap of road mist across the windshield though the rain had stopped an hour south. Saskia flicked the wipers once. The smear made the world briefly worse, then clear.

She drove north.

Her sister called near Sainte-Adèle. Saskia let it ring twice before answering through the car speakers. Ignoring Amélie only made her more determined.

“You left already?” Amélie asked.

“I told you I was leaving at seven.”

“You tell me many things. I keep only the believable ones.”

Saskia checked the mirrors. A white pickup sat too close behind her, its grille hard in the rearview. “I left at seven-twenty.”

“Ah. So you lied, but with with precision.”

“I rounded.”

“You are going alone?”

“You know I am.”

A pause. Not long. Amélie was good at making pauses seem casual, even over a phone line. Saskia could feel her choosing which door to use.

“You need air,” Amélie said finally.

“Yes.”

“C’est tout?”

“Oui. C’est tout.”

The pickup swung out and passed on a broken yellow line, fast and irritated. Apparently Saskia’s ninety in an eighty was a mortal insult. She watched it go. Its rear window had a faded sticker of a deer skull and a little plastic rosary bouncing from the mirror.

“Sask.”

“I’m hiking a trail I know,” Saskia said. “I have a map. Compass. First-aid kit. Headlamp. Battery pack. Enough food for two divorced women and a medium-sized child.”

“You joke when you are annoyed.”

“I joke when I’m funny.”

“Non.”

Saskia smiled despite herself. It made the scar near her eyebrow pull, a tight little reminder. She had cut herself there at nine, trying to climb through the basement window at her aunt’s place after locking everyone out. No one had noticed the blood until she opened the door from inside.

“I’ll text when I’m done,” she said.

“You better have signal?”

“At the trailhead, probably.”

“And after?”

“After, I’ll be on the trail.”

“You hear yourself?”

“I work in emergency planning, Amélie.”

“Ben oui. This is why you think accidents are for other people.”

Saskia did not answer right away. A good answer would have been light. A better one would have been affectionate. The one in her mouth had too much edge, so she swallowed it and changed lanes behind a camper van dragging bicycles under a grey tarp.

“I need to walk,” she said.

The line went soft with road noise.

Amélie said, “D’accord.”

That was worse than argument. Saskia reached down, found the coffee by feel, and took a drink cold enough to punish her.

“I’ll text,” she said again.

“You will.”

“Yes.”

“Not only because you promised. Because I will come find you and embarrass you in front of trees.”

“There are blackflies. They’ll handle it.”

Amélie laughed then, but the laugh thinned before the call ended. Saskia drove the remaining twenty minutes without music.

The parking area held three cars when she arrived: two with out-of-province plates, one dented blue hatchback with a child’s car seat in the back and a pair of muddy sneakers abandoned behind the rear tire. The morning had the washed-out look of weather deciding whether to keep sulking. Clouds hung low over the ridges. The trees were in that late-spring green that looked almost indecent after months of grey, every leaf too new, too willing.

Saskia stepped out and felt her left hip object before her boots hit gravel.

“Good morning to you too,” she muttered.

The old ache had begun as a fall on porch ice six years earlier. January. Black ice. Garbage bag in one hand, phone in the other because Michel had called from the grocery store unable to remember whether they used the blue dish soap or the green. She had slipped sideways, landed hard, seen white for half a second, and then got up because the garbage truck was coming. She had told Michel it was nothing. She had told herself the same thing for two weeks while limping around the house, loading the dishwasher, answering emails, making stew for his mother when the woman had bronchitis.

The hip still remembered.

Bodies are drama queens. Ignore the witness.

She changed into thicker socks on the edge of the open trunk, sitting sideways with one boot off, toes pale in the cool air. A blackfly landed on her ankle. She slapped it, missed, swore, and got repellent from the side pocket of her pack.

The cap stuck.

Of course it stuck. She turned it harder, felt the plastic bite the heel of her hand, then pop loose so suddenly the bottle jumped and spat oily spray across her knee.

“Putain.”

A man at the far end of the lot looked over from the back of the blue hatchback. He wore shorts, a fleece vest, and the soft anxious face of someone negotiating with children out of sight.

“Bugs are bad,” he said.

Saskia glanced toward him. “Yes.”

“You heading up the loop?”

“Yes.”

“It’s muddy past the second lookout.”

“Thanks.”

He waited for a little more, the kind of hiker who liked to make community out of weather and minor suffering. Saskia bent to retie her boot.

“My wife says the blue trail markers are faded after the fork,” he added.

“I’ll watch for them.”

“Easy to miss.”

“I’ll watch.”

Her tone closed the gate. The man nodded, friendly enough, and turned back to his hatchback. Somewhere beyond the toilets, a child began shouting about a salamander.

Saskia shouldered her pack. It settled too heavily at first, the straps dragging her shirt tight across her chest. She adjusted them, tightened the hip belt, loosened one shoulder, then the other. The daypack had become another small bureaucracy: compartments, buckles, contingencies. She had packed rain gear, an extra base layer, knife, lighter, whistle, emergency blanket, blister pads, water filter, paper map sealed in a plastic sleeve, compass, power bank, headlamp, spare batteries, and enough food to host a committee.

The wedding ring was in the top pocket.

She had put it there without deciding. It had lived on the kitchen counter for a week after the signing, next to the fruit bowl and a chipped mug full of pens that did not work. Then Amélie came over and saw it. She did not touch it. She just looked, and Saskia had hated her briefly for having eyes.

After that Saskia put the ring in the pack. The pack was where things went when they needed to be useful later.

There was no later use for a wedding ring in a daypack.

She locked the car.

The trail began kindly. Too kindly, maybe. A wide dirt path climbing through birch and maple, wet in the low places, root-laced where the slope sharpened. Saskia took the first twenty minutes too fast because her body wanted heat before it wanted rhythm. Her lungs warmed. Sweat gathered beneath the band of her sports bra and at the small of her back. Blackflies worried the space around her ears. Her hip complained, then quieted after the third rise.

She passed a couple coming down with poles and matching rain jackets. The woman said bonjour. Saskia answered. The man looked at Saskia’s pack, her boots, the compass clipped to her strap, and offered the approving half-smile men gave women who had equipped themselves correctly.

She disliked him for half a minute after he was gone.

Admired for carrying your own weight. Revolutionary. Alert the municipality. Enculé!

The trail narrowed after the first lookout. The view opened briefly across a sweep of dark water and ridged hills, clouds tearing thin enough to let light fall in patches. Saskia stood with one boot on slick stone and ate the apple because it was easiest to reach. The flesh was mealy. She ate all of it anyway, down to the seeds, then put the core in a baggie. She had no patience for people who thought biodegradable meant invisible.

Her phone had two bars.

She texted Amélie.

On trail. Alive. Bugs hungry.

The message sent.

Three dots appeared. Saskia regretted saying alive.

Amélie replied: Text after. Don’t adopt a bear.

Saskia typed: Bears have standards.

Then she put the phone on airplane mode, slipped it into the chest pocket of her shirt, and kept walking.

By early afternoon, the trail had stopped being pleasant. Mud took the path in long brown stretches, sucking at her soles. Roots shone with wet bark. Mosquitoes replaced blackflies in the lower patches, slower but more committed. Once, her boot sank ankle-deep near a seep and water pushed cold through the seam she had meant to reproof last fall.

“Tabarnak.”

She sat on a fallen log and changed socks, balancing one bare foot on her opposite knee while the forest made small damp noises around her. A red squirrel scolded from somewhere above, then stopped as if embarrassed by its own intensity. Her wet sock hung from a branch like a surrendered flag.

She ate half a sandwich. Turkey, mustard, too much lettuce. The bread had flattened under the weight of the thermos. She chewed without appetite and watched a mosquito settle on the back of her hand.

She let it bite.

For several seconds she just watched the body feed, its abdomen tightening red.

Then she slapped it and smeared blood across her knuckle.

Congratulations. You have successfully completed one natural exchange.

The thought came dry and mean. She wiped her hand on her pants and laughed once, a bad little sound.

She had not cried over the divorce. Not properly. There had been moments: in the shower, at the grocery store in front of the coffee filters, once in bed when a neighbour’s dog would not stop barking and the house felt too large around her. But there had been no collapse. She had handled it in pieces. Forms. Accounts. Furniture. Who kept which mugs. Michel’s mother’s birthday card already bought, already signed, what to do with that. She had made a spreadsheet because someone needed to know the date the home insurance changed.

Michel had admired that too.

“You’re being very fair,” he had said.

She had wanted to throw a plate at him. Not at his head. Near his head. A controlled expression of impact.

Instead she had said, “I’m trying not to make this worse.”

He had looked grateful.

There are violences that leave no bruise because no one does anything dramatic enough to deserve accusation. A man could love your competence and use it until there was nothing in the house that did not pass through you first. He could ask kindly, thank you afterward, praise you in public, and still leave you with the shape of his needs pressed into your life. He could say he loved that you were strong and mean he loved that he did not have to be.

A fly worried the corner of her eye. Saskia blinked it away.

You came here for air. Breathe it, then.

She finished the sandwich. Wasting food irritated her more than eating without hunger. Then she repacked, tightening the cooler bag into the bottom compartment as if she were punishing it, and continued uphill.

The blue markers appeared regularly for another hour. Small painted rectangles on trunks and stones, some fresh, some worn thin by weather. Saskia began watching for them with the clean satisfaction of a person confirming reality. Blue on pine. Blue on birch. Blue on a flat rock beside a narrow stream where the water ran clear over copper leaves. She stepped across, hand briefly on a trunk for balance, and felt sap tacky beneath her palm.

The sky cleared late. Not completely. It opened in torn places, and light came through too strong, brightening the wet leaves until every surface seemed newly made and already rotting. Her shirt stuck to her spine. Her thighs warmed with the climb. The ache in her hip had moved lower, into a stubborn band along the outside of her leg.

She checked the map at the second fork. Left for the shorter return. Right for the upper loop. The upper loop added distance, elevation, and a rocky descent that would be unpleasant if rain came back.

She went right.

The decision made her feel better for approximately six minutes.

After that, the trail rose hard through spruce and rock, and her breath grew ugly. She liked that. There was something clean about effort that could not be delegated. No one could praise her into having climbed. No one could use the fact of her legs except her. She moved from root to rock, rock to damp soil, one hand sometimes on her thigh to push through the steeper sections.

At the top, she stopped with both hands on her knees and spat into the leaves.

A raven made a rough wooden sound overhead.