The desperation in her voice frightens her. Did she make sure Tom and Olympia were safe and secure in Cabin Three? Did she hurry out too fast?

A series of clicks tell her that Ron is doing the equivalent of what was once simply called unlocking doors. Now it sounds more like he’s moving a thousand small objects out of the way.

She hears close creaking. What feels like dark air accosts her. Stuffy. Sour. The scent of an unwashed man opening the door to his windowless home.

“Malorie!”

He sounds excited but tired. Even the one word has the aristocratic lilt Malorie encountered ten years ago. She knows that Ron is what people in the old world would have called “too smart for his own good.”

“Hi, Ron,” she says. “You got a minute?”

Ron laughs. Because it’s funny. Because all he has is minutes, alone in his bunker of blindness.

“I was expecting a cadre of friends and family, but they seem to be running late,” he says. “We’ve just enough time for crumpets.”

Malorie wants to smile. She wants to make anxious jokes about the horrors like Ron Handy does. But her parents’ names are circling through her head like vultures, waiting for the hope to die.

“Something bothering you?” Ron asks. “Something with the kids? Who, might I add, are not kids any longer?”

“Did someone come by here, Ron? A man saying he was from the census?”

She can’t see his face, but she knows this question will scare him. The mere mention of an outsider claiming to be anything is enough to send Ron Handy back inside without a word.

But he remains. And when he speaks, Malorie can hear the effort of doing so in his voice.

“No. Unless I was asleep. Or perhaps so far gone into my own head that I mistook his knocking for a thought.” But the joke falls flat between them. Then, “Why not come inside? I don’t much like the exterior world these days.”

Blind, impatient, shell-shocked, Malorie steps inside. She waits as he slides everything back in place by the door.

“I used to live in the office,” Ron says. “But there’s a particular window in there that I do not like. I’ve covered it two dozen times over, but I just…do not like it.”

He touches her hand, and Malorie almost cries out.

“So I moved. Now I live where they once kept the supplies. Filters and rotors. Cans of oil. Can’t say I haven’t considered drinking one.”

“Ron…”

“Well, what? I don’t wear the new world very well. And I’m okay with that.”

He tugs on her hand, leading her deeper into his home. The moving is easier than she remembers, less junk in the way, and she understands that even a man who lives like this must make home improvements over time.