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and there along the road and shoreline, fishing boats in the harbor, a general store by the docks, a parking lot with a few old cars. He saw a woman through the window of the general store, but there was no one else around.
    Walter’s instructions were to call the hotel for a boat. His cell phone didn’t work up here, as promised, but there was a phone booth by the pier. The hotel promised to send someone within the half hour. Walter hung up and stepped out into cool air. It was getting on toward evening and the world was shifting to monochrome, the water pale and glassy under a darkening sky, shadows accumulating in the forest. He walked out to the end of the pier, luxuriating in the silence. This place was the opposite of Toronto, and wasn’t that what he’d wanted? The opposite of his previous life? Somewhere back in the eastern city, the ballet dancer and the lawyer were at a restaurant, or walking the streets holding hands, or in bed. Don’t think of it. Don’t think of it. Walter waited, listening, and for a while there was only the soft lapping of water against the pier and the occasional cry of a seagull, until in the distance he heard the vibration of an outboard motor. A few minutes later he saw the boat, a white fleck between the dark banks of forest, a toy that grew steadily until it was pulling up alongside the pier, the motor obscenely loud in all that quiet, wake splashing against pylons. The woman at the stern looked to be in her mid-twenties and wore a crisp, vaguely nautical uniform.
    “You must be Walter.” She disembarked in a single fluid motion and lashed the boat to the dock. “I’m Melissa from the hotel. May I help with your bags?”
    “Thank you,” he said. There was something startling about her, an air of apparition. He was almost happy, he realized, as the boat pulled away from the pier. There was a cold wind on his face, and he knew this was a voyage of no more than fifteen minutes, but he had an absurd sense of embarking on an adventure. They were moving so rapidly, darkness falling. He wanted to ask Melissa about the hotel, how long she’d been here, but the motor was prohibitively loud. When he glanced over his shoulder, the wake was a silver trail leading back to the scattered lights of Grace Harbour.
    Melissa piloted them around the peninsula and the hotel was before them, an improbable palace lit up against the darkness of the forest, and for the first time Walter understood what Raphael had meant when he’d talked about an element of surrealism. The building would have been beautiful anywhere, but placed here, it was incongruous, and its incongruity played a part in the enchantment. The lobby was exposed like an aquarium behind a wall of glass, all cedar pillars and slate floors. A double row of lights illuminated the path to the pier, where a doorman—Larry—met them with a trolley. Walter shook Larry’s hand and followed his luggage up the path to the hotel’s grand entrance, to the reception desk, where Raphael stood waiting with a concierge smile. After introductions, dinner, and paperwork, Walter eventually found himself in a suite on the top floor of the staff lodge, whose windows and terrace looked out into trees. He closed the curtains against the darkness and thought about what Raphael had said, about the hotel’s existing outside of time and space. There’s such happiness in a successful escape.
    By the end of his first year in Caiette, Walter realized that he was happier here than he’d ever been anywhere, but in the hours following the graffiti, the forest outside seemed newly dark, the shadows dense and freighted with menace. Who stepped out of the forest to write the message on the window? The message was written backward on the glass, Walter wrote on the incident report, which suggests it was meant to be viewed from the lobby.
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    “I appreciate the clarity of the report,” Raphael said when Walter came to his office the following afternoon.