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cut thick bamboo stalks and tied them with vines, fashioning a crude cross. She didn’t know where the idea had come from, but she planted the cross near a tree behind their hut. Then sitting cross-legged in the moss beneath the tree, she carefully etched Nathan’s name and the dates of his short life into the trunk. Though it was an empty grave, it seemed important to mark Nathan’s passing in this way. As she carved, she prayed, pouring her heart out to God. Finally she quoted the Twenty-third Psalm from memory. The ancient words and the ceremony of her actions comforted her. And though she still did not understand the why of Nate’s death, God took away her need for understanding, and she felt the tiny ember of peace flicker.
    As Daria tidied the hut, she set aside Nathan’s books to give to Anazu, Tados, and Quimico. Her own books and other supplies she gave to the children. They seemed to understand that Daria was still in mourning. They did not come for morning lessons, did not follow her around the village as they had before. Instead, they waited, tentative, for her to approach them. She craved their chattering and their easy way with her. She wanted back the life she’d known here before.
    But even as she craved her old life, she saw the boat that would take her away sitting ready at the water’s edge.
    As she returned from washing at the river, she came upon Tommi, hand fishing in a fast-running tributary beside the pathway.
    “Catching any fish?” she asked him in Timoné.
    With a fresh shyness in her presence, he held out a basket with five or six small trout in it.
    She smiled at him and spread her hands wide. “You catch a big one for me, okay?”
    “Okay,” he grinned, using his favorite English word.
    She walked on silently, bidding the little boy a final goodbye in her heart. She followed the path back to the village, committing the jungle to memory as she went. Several times along the way, she stopped and closed her eyes, listening to the soothing sounds of the rain forest, recording them in her mind. After today, she might never return, but she would hold this place in her heart, forever entwined with her memories of Nathan Camfield.
    Anazu’s boat sat ready at the trail’s edge. It was time to go, and now she felt an urgency to carry the tragic news to Nate’s family and to her own.
    In an inspired moment, she made a gift of their hut to Anazu and his family. There was no Timoné word for church , but she explained as best she could that she would like them to use it as a place to pray and to seek God.
    “It would make Dr. Nate very happy to know that you remember him here, and that you always pray to the one true God,” she said in her halting attempt at the dialect.
    Anazu thanked her for her gift. Paita embraced Daria, while Anazu’s nephews loaded the small bundles that held her belongings into the boat. Then they hoisted the craft onto their shoulders and, without a word, turned toward the forest pathway that led to the river.
    Daria followed, gulping back tears as she walked away from the cherished memories she had lived here with her husband. She remembered the day Nathan had disappeared down this same trail. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
    Overhead the birds of the rain forest squawked and sang in a harsh cacophony. The sun burned down on her back, its scorching rays a comfort simply because it was something she could feel.
    As she followed her guides along the trail, she turned several times and drank in the scene, trying to sear the picture in her memory.
    Finally, as the village disappeared from sight behind a curtain of thick vegetation, Daria turned back to the trail. Forging ahead, she wrapped her hands protectively over the small mound of her stomach, cradling the only part of Nathan Camfield she had left—the child she was now certain grew within her womb.

Four
    T he trees spread out beneath them as far as the eye could see—an ocean of emerald green broken only by an