But autumn is the season of letting go . The gums were already shedding bark in long, fibrous ribbons. Fungi—lemon-yellow and ghost-white—had erupted overnight on the damp sides of fallen logs. The air smelled of leaf litter and loam, of things breaking down to feed what came next.

Liam had been putting off this walk for three months. The “Grieving Man’s Loop,” his wife Chloe had called it—a five-kilometre circuit through the state forest behind their cottage. She’d walked it every morning during her final winter, even when the oxygen tube looped under her chin like a silver necklace. He hadn't been able to set foot on the trail since she passed, last September.

For a long while, he just listened. Not to silence, but to autumn’s specific frequency: the rustle of a lyrebird scratching in the undergrowth, the distant plink of a single drop from last night’s rain, the whisper of wind through stringybark. It wasn’t the mournful quiet of winter or the frantic buzz of spring. It was a resting quiet.