The Sam and Mary Walsh Malorie knew lived near the Wisconsin border. They’d have no reason to go to St. Ignace, to the bridge that unites Michigan’s two peninsulas. Even when facing the end of the world. Especially then. Shannon used to joke that the Upper Peninsula is the end of the world. So why would Sam and Mary have migrated south?

Did they come…looking for their daughters?

She can’t breathe. It’s simply too heavy. She feels like she could faint. Or worse.

She paces the office, her eyes darting back to the names on the page. She can’t calm down, can’t formulate a single solid opinion. She imagines Sam and Mary Walsh surviving as long as she has, the sorrows and horrors they would have endured, the unfathomable stress of living in a world so different than the one they raised their children in.

She wants Tom the man to be here with her. She wants to hear what he would say.

Did she and Shannon give up on their parents too soon? Neither had anything to go on other than the silence from Sam and Mary’s end and the thought that, perhaps, their parents were not the survivor type.

But was Malorie? When this all began…was she the survivor type?

“Fuck.”

“Mom?”

It’s Olympia, from the outer office.

Maybe Mom and Dad have changed, too. If there’s one thing Malorie has learned while raising these kids, it’s that parenthood is not static. Parenthood does not stand still. And the mother of two teens in the new world undergoes alterations, sudden instinctual thrusts, almost as powerful as the creatures she protects them from.

“No,” Malorie says. Because…there’s just no way. No way her parents are still alive in Michigan, gardening blindfolded and painting their windows black. There’s no way they’ve endured the horrors she has and still hold hands the way they once did, always did, sitting beside each other on the couch.

She feels dizzy. Faint. She sits on the edge of the old desk and stares into the abyss of her past, her childhood, life in the old world, so long ago now and so severely, maddeningly different.

Seventeen years.

Seventeen years ago she found out she was pregnant with Tom. Only he wasn’t “Tom” yet. Malorie had yet to meet her son’s namesake, the man who had such a profound impact on her that she still asks him, silently, for advice on every decision she makes, sixteen years after his death. Is it possible her parents are alive? In a world where they didn’t even meet the man she named her son after? And if so, what unspeakable occurrences have they lived through?

Who has helped them survive?