Each minute of the next six months is a thicket. The thickets contain police officers, undertakers, insurance agents, attorneys, claims adjusters, benefits counsellors, human-resources workers, notaries, friends. Unforeseen namesEmmaline Cortez, Omar Eaton, Dalary Mason, Clyde Bender-become very important then very unimportant. Somewhere in there her two daughters fly in from and back to their respective lives, in Chicago and Asheville. In early January, Nadia emerges from the last thicket. She drives up to Montreal.

Her consciousness has changed-it, the consciousness, has made her more optically alert. She notices, first, that a beautiful spare brownness has befallen the forests; and, second, that she could not care less about the brownness of the forests, not even if she turned into an orangutan. Orangutans are on her mind because she has been watching orangutan videos. Farther north, the sights-the snowy mountaintops, the ice cascades, the towers on the St. Lawrence-insist on stronger emotions. These emotions are not in her possession.

She does have one encounter with the sublime. It happens in the Adirondacks. The dense dark of night has gathered on every side, but in the west, above the heights to her left, there is a peach-colored patch of last light. Something about the peach light feels abnormal-does not conform to the sense of dusk. The light is extraterrestrial, she grasps. It has come from far, far, far, far away. The Earth has no light of its own.

Nadia addresses these thoughts to an interlocutor who is nowhere to be seen. She has only recently become aware of this inner other. Seemingly neither male nor female, the other listens patiently. When it speaks, it does so carefully. It does not take offense. None of these traits were Drew's. He was an unreliable listener, an interrupter, a blurter. He was sensitive to criticism. Who, then, is this internal entity, who has no counterpart in her past or present?