My heart shatters. The teenagers of Nightlight’s past found this sanctum, kept each other company through dark times, and commemorated the victory by leaving their initials like carvings in a lovebird’s tree. Through loneliness. Through torture and endless invasions of privacy. Nightlight tried to snuff it out, but love grew. Love found its way to the island, and this sanctuary made it possible. Whoever first transcribed their initials into a heart started a chain reaction that led to an entirely different Winner’s Wall. In the cabin, the Winner’s Wall of “successful” Nightlight graduates is a depressing monument to control and domination. But this wall is an anthem of wild, unchained resistance.

What happened to them? Wherever these couples are now, even if they eventually fell back into Nightlight’s program, this wall is proof that they fought. Fallen soldiers in the war against Nightlight.

My throat snaps shut as, among the fray, my fingers find familiar initials: RH + DD.

RH for Ricky Hannigan? But who is DD? Some sad-eyed, handsome boy who held Ricky and kissed away his traumas: being betrayed by his cousin and torn from the life he was supposed to have—a life that had nothing to do with Nightlight or his rotten family? What happened to DD? Did he marry a woman and have kids? Do his kids have kids? Did he eventually confess the truth and move in with a man, and now every few years, his heart pinches with the memory of this cave?

This sanctum is unbearably heavy from the weight of so much time. I can’t stomach looking at another batch of initials; no matter what story I invent for them, it ends in tears. Maybe some of them got out. Someone has to have gotten out.

“Do you see the initials SP anywhere?” I ask, silently mopping tears with my wrist.

“I don’t think so,” Marcos says, searching. “Why?”

“Stanley Packard. The Reverend. If he used to come here as a camper, then he knows it’s a good hiding place and we’re not safe.” Marcos hunts the wall of hearts before reporting no secret love life for SP. “Aw, poor Reverend. Maybe if he’d gotten some, he wouldn’t have become so murdery.”

“Yeah…” Marcos chuckles with a twinge of dread.

“No cave kisses for him. He wanted to be good.”

The Lovers’ Wall behind me, I watch the falls crash below, hypnotized until Marcos speaks again: “I don’t want to be good.”