“They’re not alive,” she says. Because there’s just no way. It’s too much, too huge. Every time she hears Olympia giving her the news, the names, Malorie hears the smile that must have been present on her daughter’s face. It’s driving her mad. Doesn’t her bright, impossibly hopeful daughter know that what she told her is actually untrue? They simply can’t be alive. The list is wrong. There are a thousand Sam and Mary Walshes. There’s no census. The man somehow got her parents’ names and wrote them onto the pages, Trojan-horsing his actual intent; getting Malorie and her kids to leave the safety they’ve finally found.

The man is trying to destroy the peace and security of Camp Yadin.

Maybe, just maybe, the man was actually Gary.

Malorie punches the desk. Then she gets behind it, looks hard at the names on the page. It’s been a long time since she rifled through Gary’s briefcase and found his dangerous thoughts written down, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever forget the tilt of his hand, the dark electricity that was present on every page.

She studies the handwriting.

And she knows.

This is not Gary’s writing. It’s not even close to the same.

She looks to the office door, thinks of her teens on the other side. She knows they must be imagining a journey out, similar to their journey in, ten years gone. Tom must be excited by this. Olympia is probably already preparing.

But do they really believe this list? Has she raised them to be so naïve? This impossible, absolutely insane list of…of…

“Survivors,” Malorie says.

She wants to break something. She wants to punch a hole in the office wall. She wants to kick the desk over.

So she does.

She plants a shoe against the edge of the desk and shoves as hard as she can, sending the old thing onto its side. The pages scatter like white birds leaping from a falling tree, and Olympia hollers, “Mom! Mom! Are you okay?”

She sounds scared. In the new world, when you hear someone lash out from the other side of a door, it’s not hard to imagine something is in there with them.

“I’m fine,” Malorie yells. “I’m fucking fine.”

She hears the teens whispering on the other side. Tom is no doubt asking Olympia why Malorie would be upset by this news and Olympia is no doubt explaining exactly why.

Because it’s been seventeen years. Because she believed they were dead. Because she grieved already and because she’s felt the insatiable loss of Sam and Mary Walsh for so long that it’s become part of her now.

And this? This sudden list?

This is mean.