“Jesus,” she says. She can’t get a firm hold on any of her reactions, opinions, feelings. She imagines herself on a blind train. She imagines the people who run it. She imagines herself and her teens waiting at a train station for a month, a year, ten years, never knowing when the train is coming, not allowed to look up the tracks for a headlight in the distance.

Olympia steps to her, takes her hand.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s gonna be okay.”

But the words bring Malorie no comfort. It’s been seventeen years.

“I need to talk to Ron Handy,” she says again. Then she’s tying her blindfold around her head, a motion she’s done so many times that it’s as natural as tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Close your eyes,” she tells them. Even now. Even as the reality she’s finally gotten used to has been cracked again, as she feels the physical pain of grief’s reversal or perhaps grief all over again, even now she tells her teens to close their eyes.

“Okay,” Olympia says.

“Closed,” Tom says.

Malorie opens the office door and steps out onto a wood floor that feels too sturdy, doesn’t conform to her idea of life right now, doesn’t line up with the absolute darkness she falls through, a place where it’s impossible to decipher the right or wrong thing to do.

FIVE

Malorie discovered Ron Handy before she found Camp Yadin. A decade ago, she’d smelled the distant odor of gasoline, walking her then six-year-olds in search of a new home. Hoping for canned goods or packaged snacks, she followed the scent to what she couldn’t have known was his home, a fortified service station on the side of a Michigan country road. Ron Handy lives behind wood boards, fat mattresses, car doors, and layers of sheet metal. As far as Malorie knows, he won’t even remove his blindfold inside.

Now, as she reaches the gravel shoulder of that same road, her nerves electrified, her head dizzy with too many possibilities, she realizes it’s been three years since she’s visited him. Ron has never come into Camp Yadin. Ron doesn’t leave his place. Ever.

The old-world instinct of looking both ways before crossing the street has long been exterminated, and Malorie hurries across the gravel to the pebbled gas station lot. For all she knows, Ron Handy is dead inside, rotting, mad flies buzzing and breeding on his remains.

She thinks of Sam and Mary Walsh rotting, too.

She reaches the fortress, shin first, banging against something hard. If Ron’s alive inside, he’s heard her. But she knocks on a wall of wood all the same.

“Malorie?”

It’s been three years and she’s still the last person he’s seen. She knows this now.

“Yes, Ron. It’s me.”