She enters the lodge. Despite the high ceiling and open room, it’s always hottest in here. Malorie thinks it’s because of the tall windows, despite having painted those windows black long ago. Still, she’s reminded of the saunas, so prevalent in the Upper Peninsula where she was raised, the steam boxes her mother and father insisted on each night before bed. By the time she’s crossed the former common area where campers once took meals, she longs for the lake she and Shannon leaped into, following those saunas, running from the steaming rocks.

She stops. She thinks she’s heard something. Movement. Something outside the lodge. But Camp Yadin plays tricks. Branches fall. Wind blows. Cabins creak.

She waits. She listens.

It is not lost on her how vulnerable she is at this moment. The man who claimed to be from the census could be standing in the corner of this room, preparing something. A creature could be inches from her face, observing, still, the effect they have on the people they should never have crossed paths with. But seventeen years into the new world, Malorie decides to treat her personal darkness differently. While she’s certainly as staunch as the others at the school for the blind claimed she was, and while she may be partially paranoid, as her own son said while in a fit of rage, she’s also able to pretend that the darkness she exists in does not include creatures and camps, life and death. Rather, she imagines she’s walking through the home she grew up in. Dad is by the stove in the kitchen, listening to a game on a small radio that Mom tells him he keeps too close to the burner. Mom reads a book, sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Shannon to take her turn at Scrabble.

This is a much nicer reality. And who’s to say what’s real in the dark?

As Malorie exits the common room, as she enters the hall that leads to the large kitchen in back, she can almost smell the venison Dad cooks, can hear Mom flip a page, can sense Shannon’s deliberations. Nobody liked playing games with Shannon.

“If you think your mom is a perfectionist, Tom,” Malorie says, “you shoulda met your aunt.”

By the time she enters the kitchen, she’s no longer in the home she grew up in; now she talks to Tom the man in the house she fled twelve years ago, talks about Gary.

“Stop it,” she tells herself. It isn’t easy. Yet years of this back-and-forth, a decade and a half of horrific memories springing like attractions in a haunted house at the Marquette County Fair, have lessened the grip these bad thoughts have on her. Despite what Tom her son might believe, Malorie does not live in fear.