“I found them then,” Dean says. “Beside the very bed I woke up in. The two of them dead from having stabbed one another with knives from the kitchen drawer. The knives I’d used a thousand times to cut up their canned meat and fruit. They didn’t cry out when they did it. They didn’t make any sound at all. They laughed and laughed and then dared one another to do it. I’ll never know exactly how it was done. But the day my two little ones went mad and killed each other, that’s the day I unsealed the back door. To carry them outside. To bury them. And even then, racked with despair, completely fucking destroyed, I kept thinking, They saw one, despite everything you did, Dean, they saw one anyway. And you know what, Jill?”

“What?”

“I never found the sliver.”

Malorie doesn’t ask him what he means. She knows what he means.

“I never found the hole in the wall, the space between boards, the infinitesimal spot they must’ve looked through, looked outside, to have seen what did that to them. Oh, I tried. You can trust me on that. I looked everywhere with a flashlight, no longer caring if I saw one myself or not. Just moved through the darkness of that house for six weeks, searching. Mostly on my knees. Looking for that sliver of light, that Goddamn little space, overlooked, that they, as children, who saw the world different than I did, must’ve found.”

“My name is Malorie,” she says. Because she doesn’t know what else to say.

Dean laughs. It’s strained, and it’s loaded with tears.

Malorie reaches across the table but doesn’t find his hand right away. For a second it feels as if she’s on her knees, aping the walk of children, looking for light in a house of darkness.

Then she finds it. Or he finds hers. Either way, she grips his hand.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yep. But hey, it’s the day I decided to start looking again. And that means something.” Then, “Thank you, Malorie. For trusting me with your real name. And for listening to the worst thing that could’ve happened to a man. Shit. And look at me now. I’m the guy who got a train running again. In the new world. No small feat. But I’ll tell you what…every run we make, day or night, it still feels like I’m searching for that sliver of open space, that tiny hole, that speck in the universe I didn’t cover up. The point in space and time that my kids found. The one that drove them mad.”

SIXTEEN

“Mom’s gonna kill you if she catches you,” Olympia says.

“How’s she gonna catch me? She’ll be blindfolded.”