He pressed them to his lips and tasted bark. Up close he noticed how the light wood inside was unblemished. A thought surfaced and he felt a cold hand work its way across his skin. He dropped the pieces of wood and stared at them. For a moment he had been convinced that he was holding two bones, pale and soft. Picked clean of flesh by wolves.

* * *

The following day Cindy had arranged for them to visit Belmont Pines, a large child–friendly wood on the outskirts of the county. There was a vast wooden fort for the kids—and their envious fathers—to expend energy on. Jake loved it. He would sprint around its circumference screaming for Frank to chase him. The towering pines offered shelter from the sun and Frank would hurtle through the shadows, dodging the flying knuckles and elbows of excited children, often struggling to pick Jake out from the crowd. When they were both exhausted and returned to base camp to refuel, Cindy would always be prepared: she’d be waiting for them with drinks and biscuits, which they devoured in silence, secretly plotting their next move.

“What do you want to do first?” Frank asked Jake as they drove out of the city towards the wood. “Football or fort?”

Jake assumed a look of intense concentration and Frank wanted to laugh. It was the face he often saw drawn across the boy’s face when he was taking a shit.

“Nitpic,” Jake said finally, seemingly happy with his answer.

Frank turned his head and looked into the backseat, frowning. Beside him, Cindy was laughing.

“He means ‘picnic,’ don’t you, Jake?”

The boy was already losing interest in the conversation and was looking out of the window.

“Nitpic,” he said. “Nitpic on the grass, under the big tree.”

Frank laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Nitpic it is.”

They drove through the gates that marked out the perimeter of the woodland and headed deeper into the swathe of trees. Once they’d parked they gathered the picnic and the football from the trunk of the car and began a leisurely walk into the heart of the woods. The pace was slow to allow Jake to meander, both Cindy and Frank taking great delight in the boy’s simple curiosity. He picked up stones and touched them, delicate as rose petals. If they met a certain mysterious criteria that only Jake himself was privy to, he would drop them into his coat pocket and move on. After ten minutes the boy was so loaded down with the damn things Frank had to intervene. He suggested that some of them needed to be released before the weight of them dragged Jake to his knees. There followed a five-minute inspection of every stone hitherto collected to determine which ones might be considered incidental. It was a considered process, Jake initially forming three piles, which he gradually whittled down to one. These he returned to his pocket. The stones he’d decided to discard he hid beneath a large bush, which his parents had seen him do before. His plan was to retrieve them the next time they visited the woods, but invariably he would forget. Either that he already had a load stashed away, or under which bush his treasure had been placed.

On one occasion, Frank and Cindy had spent most of the afternoon hunting down a particular white stone that Jake had rejected by mistake. It was special, he said.