Sophie Barbeau had taken just four steps through the front door of her childhood home when her mother noticed the bruises.

“What’s this?”

Her mother licked the pad of her thumb and scrubbed at Sophie’s cheek, the way she’d scrubbed at dirt and crumbs and smears of melted popsicle when Sophie was little. A deep purple bruise bloomed on her cheekbone as a coat of makeup rubbed away.

Sophie pushed her mother’s hand aside. “Ow, Maman. It’s nothing. Just a bruise.”

“I can see that. How did you get it?”

Maman reached for Sophie’s face again, but Sophie was faster.

“I don’t know, I just woke up with it this morning. I must have bumped into a doorframe when I was bringing in the groceries.”

Her mother crossed her arms. “Well that’s so strange, you’ve been walking through doors all your life and you’ve never bumped into one before. Was Jeff around when you happened to bump into this door?”

Jeff’s name almost never left Maman’s mouth unless it was wrapped in an accusation. She had just barely tolerated him when he was the weedy young man Sophie had brought home from her university studies in Kingston. She had openly disliked him when he turned into the fiancé who sent Sophie back upstairs to change into outfits he approved of. And she truly, genuinely loathed him when he became the husband who smashed a piece of cake into Sophia’s face at the wedding, even after she had privately begged him not to.

Sophie’s cheeks flushed red under the bruise. “He’s not… it’s nothing, Maman. Really. When he gets here tomorrow, I don’t want you asking him about this.”

A set of feet thundering up the basement stairs interrupted whatever Maman was going to say next. A moment later, Sophie’s younger brother Etienne—an adult now, but still living at home—flew around the corner and flung himself at Sophie.

“Good to see you too,” Sophie said into the shoulder of his sweatshirt as he picked her up off the ground. “C’mon, you can help me carry in Christmas presents from my car. But no looking in the bags!”

Sophie waited until her brother had bounded out to the driveway, then turned back to her mother.

“Seriously, Maman. There’s nothing wrong, I promise. Let’s just let this go and have a nice holiday.”

But it wasn’t nothing—not to Sophie’s mother, at least—and she was not willing to let it go.

#

When Sophie emerged from the basement that afternoon, blowing dust off a cardboard box filled with ornaments, she heard her mother clapping from her recliner.

“Look at that,” said Maman. “Went through two doorways and up and down a flight of stairs, and didn’t hit your face on anything! Look how talented you’ve become.”

Sophie touched the thick coat of fresh concealer she had applied to her cheek and said nothing.

That evening, as Sophie whirled about the kitchen preparing dinner, adjusting stove burners and rummaging through cupboards looking for the long-lost lids of cooking pots, her mother leaned against the edge of the counter and stared at her.

“Such good reflexes you have,” said Maman. “Opening all those cupboards and not hitting yourself in the face even one time.”

Sophie snatched a wooden spoon from their holder and stirred a boiling pot of potatoes before it could bubble over. “Enough, Maman. Go tell Etienne it’s his turn to set the table.”

After dinner, when the leftovers had been put away and the dishes sat drying in the rack, Maman filled the electric kettle and plugged it into the wall.

“Sophie,” she said, and this time there was no hint of sarcasm in her voice.

Sophie looked up from the paperback book she had been reading at the kitchen table.

“Let’s talk about what really happened to your face.”

Just then, Etienne burst into the kitchen. He fished two cookies out of the jar next to the stove and reached for the fridge.

“We’re out of milk. I used the last of it for dinner,” Sophie called to her brother.

He laughed. “Don’t worry, Dad should be back from the store any minute.”

Sophie and Etienne’s father had abandoned the family before either one of them was entirely out of diapers. There’d been no visits, no calls, no birthday cards—as their mother told it, he had simply gotten up one day and taken off to God-Knows-Where, a phrase she repeated so often that Sophie once believed it to be the name of the town where her father lived. Those who knew him said that he was not a man worth missing, and so he was not missed. As Sophie and Etienne grew older, they joked about him having taken off to the store for milk or cigarettes; in Maman’s house, he was more of a punchline than a presence.

Etienne saluted his mother and sister with one of the cookies and jogged back down the hallway, heading for his bedroom.

“Sophie,” Maman said, as soon as they were alone.

“Jeff’s been under a lot of stress lately.”

Maman blinked at her. “So he did—”

Sophie stood up from her chair and started rummaging in the cupboards for teabags and mugs.

“He’s been picking up a lot of extra shifts at work. We’re only barely making ends meet. I… I’ve been pushing him too much lately, and…” Sophie trailed off.

“Sophie, no one should ever—”

“He’s sorry.” Sophie put the mugs down on the counter a little too hard. “He said he’s sorry. It’s never going to happen again. Really, you don’t need to worry.”

Behind Sophie, the kettle began to boil.

#

Sophie woke up that night to her mother standing over her childhood bed, shaking her shoulder.

“Wha—”

“Shhh,” her mother said, holding a finger to her own lips. “Get dressed. Quickly. We’re going outside.”

Sophie sat up. “Is something wrong?”

“Shhh, your brother is sleeping. Everything is fine. You and I are going for a walk.”

The clock on Sophie’s bedside table told her that it was far too late to be venturing outdoors, but a lifetime of being raised by Maman told her that there was no point in arguing. She slid back her covers and fumbled around in the dark for her jeans and socks.

“I’ll meet you outside,” her mother said. “Don’t take too long.”

The house Sophie grew up in was nestled in the Eastern Quebec woods, embedded in the edge of the tree line like a stubborn summer tick. As children, she and her brother had not been allowed to venture out of sight of the house. Maman had reinforced this perimeter with endless stories about the dangers that lurked in the woods and the children who had fallen victim to them. Once, she had woken Sophie and Etienne in the middle of the night and brought them out to the porch to hear the sound of a train horn blaring in the distance.

“Do you hear that?” she’d asked. They’d nodded, wiping sleep and snowflakes from their eyes.

“Qu'est-ce que c'est, Maman?” asked Etienne. What is it, Mama?

“Marcel Gagnon went out hunting with his older brother today along the railroad tracks. He was supposed to stay in sight of the tracks, but he wandered out too far and got lost in the forest. They’ve tied down the train horn, hoping that he’ll hear it and follow the sound out of the woods. It’s been going off since sunset.”

The three of them huddled together on the porch, listening to the horn. Marcel was just two years ahead of Sophie in school. They were not friends, but in a town the size of theirs, it was impossible not to know him.

The horn went off for three more days before the woods went silent. Maman said they had given up the search. Marcel was never found.

So when Sophie stepped out of the house in the middle of the night, still shrugging into one of her brother’s oversized overcoats she’d pilfered from a hall closet, she was surprised to see her mother standing out in the middle of the yard and aiming a flashlight at the woods.

“What are you doing? Let’s go this way,” Sophia said, heading for the long driveway that led out to the main gravel road. But Maman shook her head and gestured to the trees.

“No, mon chou. We’re taking a different path tonight.”

Sophie stared at her mother as though she had suddenly grown an extra head. Maman didn’t seem to notice—she walked into the woods, leaving Sophie scrambling after her.

They were only fifty paces into the trees before the lights of the house vanished into the branches. The trees were so dense that neither starlight nor snow could work its way to the ground. Sophie found herself struggling to keep up with the beam of her mother’s flashlight, lighting the way through the crisscrossing boughs of white pines.

“Where are we going, Maman?” Sophie asked, watching her breath fog in the air in front of her.

“This way,” was all Maman would say.

They were deeper into the woods than Sophie had ever been when the beam of the flashlight caught a homemade sign stretched between two trees with lengths of rusted chain.

PASSAGE INTERDIT, the sign read. NO TRESPASSING.

All her life, Sophia had known her mother to be an ardent maker and follower of rules. She drove exactly the speed limit on forgotten backroads where the Sûreté du Québec had never once written a speeding ticket. She dutifully recycled everything that could be placed inside her municipality-issued blue bins. Her Christmas lights came down on January 2^nd, regardless of the weather. Maman did not bend rules.

So Sophie could not hold back the startled noise that escaped her when her mother lifted the sign and walked right under it.

“Maman!” she hissed. “The sign says we can’t go this way.”

Her mother glanced back at the sign as if it was a roadside curiosity that she had no interest in stopping for.

“It’s fine.” Maman turned to keep moving.

“It’s not fine! The sign says to keep out! Maybe there’s something dangerous up ahead.”

“It’s fine,” Maman repeated, her voice flat. “There is something dangerous up ahead, but I can handle it. I’m the one who put the sign there.”

Sophie stood swaying in place for a moment, as if she had been slapped across the face with those words. Then she lifted the sign and followed Maman.

The land was sloping downward now, and Sophie found herself concentrating on the placement of her feet as they marched wordlessly, endlessly, relentlessly onward. Maman offered nothing but a beam of light and occasional warnings to avoid tripping as she led them onward.

Sophie did not know how long they had been walking when they finally stepped out of the trees. They had come to the edge of a lake that went on as far as they could see, black waters stretching out into the waiting arms of dark mountains in the distance. If the area had not been so remote, had not had such poor weather, had not been quite so French, the shores might have been dotted with docks and cottages, vacation homes belonging to wealthy Ontarians and Americans looking for a place to get away.

But the shores were empty. There was nothing there but trees and rocks and Sophie and Maman.

Sophie’s mother groaned as she lowered herself down onto a boulder near the edge of the water.

“What are you doing?” Sophie asked.

“I’m waiting,” said Maman, “and so are you.”

“Waiting for what?”

“Waiting.”

Sophie knew when she could win an argument with Maman, and she knew when she would have better odds of drawing blood from the granite bedrock beneath her feet. She sat down on a boulder next to her mother’s and settled in to wait. And wait. And wait.

The cold night air had just about bitten all the way through Sophie’s thin jacket when the fog started to roll in over the lake. It began as a fine mist rising up off the water, like steam from a boiled pot. And then, as they watched, thick tendrils reached over the mountains and down to the lake, as though the white-clouded fingers of an enormous hand were grasping for them across the water, coming closer and closer, swallowing everything in their path.

From beside her, Sophie heard Maman whisper, “She’s here.”

And that’s when all the breath left Sophie’s lungs.

There was a woman in the fog. A woman made from fog. She was flying over the lake toward them, not quite solid enough to be real but too solid to be an apparition, her hair streaming behind her and evaporating into the night air. She moved soundlessly across the water, her head frozen at an angle that was not quite right, clouded eyes fixed on the shore where they stood.

Sophie felt her mother’s hand on her elbow and she stood, ready to run, ready to escape. But Maman was leading her forward, toward the shore. Sophie started to wrench her arm out of her mother’s grasp, but her mother held tight to her coat sleeve.

“Shhhh,” said Maman. “Be brave.”

The figure—the woman—stopped suddenly when she was just twenty feet from where they stood, floating the same distance off the water. She tipped her head to another, even less natural angle, as though she was waiting for something.

“I apologize for disturbing you,” Maman called to the spectre. “I have come here because I feel there is no other way.”

The figure stared at her in silence.

“You helped me once before,” said Maman, and if Sophie’s head had not been alight with the shrieks of every nerve and muscle fibre screaming for her to run, she might have been surprised to notice the tears streaming down her mother’s cheeks. “Please. I beg you, as a mother. Please help my daughter.”

The spectre turned her face toward Sophie, and her milk-white eyes seemed to be studying her. Her hand trailed fog as she slowly raised it to her face, touching the spot on her own cheek where Sophie’s bruise had blossomed. She turned back to Maman and slowly nodded her head.

And then she was dissolving right before their eyes, evaporating back into the mist from which she’d come. Her skin and hair and dress were stretching, thinning, melting, until the parts of her that had once looked so solid were twisting into the still night air like the last gasps of smoke from a campfire.

“We can leave now,” said Maman, turning from the shore.

They walked back in silence, retracing the route they had come. The lights of the house were just visible through the trees when Sophie finally spoke.

“Who was that woman?” she asked. “What was she?”

“She had her own name, once,” said Maman. “It’s long gone now. She’s been here for a very, very long time.”

Maman stopped walking, and Sophie stopped too.

“How did you find out about her?” Sophie asked.

“We all know about her. All the women in town—Jeanne, Marie, Marguerite, all of us. Our mothers knew about her. Our grandmothers too. She wants to be a secret, and we keep her that way.”

Sophie thought of the women in town going to church every Sunday and carrying this secret in their pockets as they lined up to take communion.

Maman rubbed her hands together against the cold. “Whoever she is, she once belonged to this town. We can feel it. She was one of us, and someone hurt her very badly. So we keep her hidden, and she protects us.”

Sophie felt the black-ink mark of her bruise throb.

Maman looked at her. “I can’t tell you what to do, mon chou. Lord knows I never really could. But if you are ready to stop living with a monster, she will help you.”

Sophie said nothing. Maman reached for her hand.

“When Jeff arrives tomorrow, take him for a walk after sunset. It has to be after sunset. Walk the path I showed you tonight, and take him to the edge of the water. She will help you the only way she knows how. When you come back here, you will come back alone. You will be free.” Maman paused and waited for Sophie to look up at her. “I need you to understand that. Once you accept her help, there is no going back. And we will never speak of it again.”

Sophie looked at her mother for a long while.

“You told her that she helped you once before.”

The statement hung in the air between them, thicker than the mist on the lake. Sophie’s mother said nothing.

“Helped you with what, Maman?”

Maman held Sophie’s gaze until Sophie closed her eyes and nodded. Then she kissed Sophie’s bruised cheek and went back into the house without a word.

#

Jeff arrived right on schedule, dragging his suitcase through the front door just after seven o’clock in the evening.

“Home for the holidays at last! God, these dirt roads are horrible,” he boomed, sniffing the air. “What’s for dinner? Must be Maman cooking tonight—that smells way too good to be Sophie’s cooking.”

It was almost a joke, and when he laughed, the smile almost met his eyes.

She helped him drag his bags into her bedroom, and he shut the door behind them.

“Fix your face,” he told her.

“What?”

He curled his own face into a sneer and pointed at her cheek, the red and purple bruise visible even through the coat of makeup she had applied.

“I’ve seen you hide pimples under enough makeup to patch a hole in the drywall, but you’re leaving that visible? Why? You want your mom and your brother to see it? What, are you trying to punish me? Make me look like the bad guy?”

“It’s not like that, I—”

“Fix it.”

Sophie unzipped the makeup bag she’d left on her vanity and started dabbing beige liquid onto her cheekbone with a wedge of sponge. When she’d applied enough to make her face feel like freshly-pasted wallpaper, she turned back around. He was leaning over his unzipped suitcase on the bed, carefully unpacking his folded clothes.

“Better?” she asked.

He looked up, and his face softened. “Much better.”

She turned around to pack up her makeup case and felt him slip his arms around her shoulders, hugging her to him.

“Sorry,” he murmured into her hair. “It’s just been a long day. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

“You’re right,” she said, and gestured to the snow falling outside the window. “It’s such a pretty evening, and dinner won’t be ready for a while. Let’s go outside for a walk.”

They caught sight of Maman standing at the stove as they made their way downstairs, tugging on their toques and mittens as they went.

“You’re going out?” she asked, holding Sophie’s gaze. “Make sure you’re back in time for dinner.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Maman,” said Sophie. “I will be.”

© 2026 Janel Comeau