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She kept pace, as she had since day three, adjusting her stride to stay behind my left shoulder—precisely where I could see her best. I didn’t know if she'd figured it out or if her body had simply adapted, and I didn’t ask. Asking would imply I’d been contemplating her body’s position relative to mine.

By the second hour, we’d settled into an unexpected rhythm.

She handed me the clippers before I reached for them. I moved a hemlock branch out of her sightline without breaking stride; she stepped through the gap and continued talking. We were two people who had learned where the other’s hands would be.

I’d worked alongside crews for a season at a time and never achieved that level of synchronicity. It usually took men a month to stop watching me instead of the tree.

At the top of the rise, I stopped in front of a maple and stood for a while.

“That one’s finished,” I said.

She looked up from her notebook. The maple was in full leaf, as green as June.

“It looks healthy.”

“It isn’t. Two years, maybe less.”

I expected her to ask if it was a hazard to her survey plots. That was always the question: Is it going to fall on me, and can you make it not?

“How do you know? It’s in leaf. What are you seeing that I’m not?”

Nobody had ever asked me that. In all my years of climbing other people’s trees, not one had asked what I was looking at.

“The root plate,” I said. “There, where the ground’s lifted on the uphill side. Barely perceptible now, but it’s moved once, and it’ll move again. And there’s a stain coming down the trunk from the old wound where water’s gotten in behind the bark. It’s leafing hard this year because it’s frightened. Trees do that. They put everything into seed when they know they’re going.”

She was writing fast, scratching notes onto the page, her mouth silently shaping the words. She reached the end and underlined something.

“Frightened,” she said. “Is that the term?”

“No. That’s just what it looks like.”

She underlined it again.

She documented everything—the moss, the light levels, the flowers in the ground, the name of the innkeeper’s dog. She’d written down something I said about the maple, and I hadn’t decided what to do with that yet.

At noon, I set down my pack and handed her the second lunch.

She stared at it.

“I brought two,” I explained. “Just in case.”

The words hung in the air, irrevocable. I picked up my sandwich and looked hard at the middle distance until it was gone.

I’d packed it at four in the morning in a kitchen that smelled like bread, and I knew who it was for, and I wasn’t going to think about that.

The trouble began at the bottom of the beech slope.

Hazel was fifteen feet ahead, crouched under low branches, camera raised. She’d found something. I could tell by her posture—her shoulders had stilled, and her voice had dropped to the low, delighted, and utterly private register she used when speaking to plants. Her journal lay open on her knee, pressed flat with one hand, her gaze shifting between the page and the branch.

“Oh,” she murmured. “Oh, you’re—hold on, hold on⁠—”

That “oh”—delighted, startled, wide open—went straight through me, settling in my chest like it intended to stay.

Sunlight filtered through the canopy. Full, direct, unbroken. The birds had gone quiet. I’d been listening to her instead of listening to the wood.

The lace unfurled, soundless, as wide as a spread bedsheet, dropping directly toward the back of her neck.

I was already moving.