He turned out the light, set his glasses back on the shelf, and lay down.

“What?” she snapped, incredulous. “You’re going back to sleep? Seriously?”

“It’s three thirty in the morning, Helen. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”

Nate had this uncanny ability to sleep no matter what. He’d be out in no time, and once he was asleep, it was nearly impossible to wake him. Alarms never worked. He proudly said that he once slept through a magnitude 6.5 earthquake in El Salvador when he was on a research trip in grad school.

Helen just wasn’t wired that way. She was a terrible insomniac, especially when in a new place. And now that there was something out there screaming, her chances of falling back to sleep were slim. And it was probably best that way: one of them had to stay awake in case whatever was out there came back.

She lay there in the dark, listening to the wind, to Nate’s gentle snoring. The owl hooted again. But no more screams. How, she wondered for the thousandth time, had she ever let Nate talk her into this? She remembered Jenny teasing her, saying, “Think of all you’re giving up! And for what?”

Now here she was, lying awake in bed, listening for the sounds of a mysterious screaming animal—just the sort of thing Jenny had warned her about.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to imagine what it must have been like here when the settlers first came. When there were no electric lights. No internet to research animals that made terrible sounds in the middle of the night. When she couldn’t sleep, she thought about history. Of research she’d done, of facts she knew about the past, because somehow, looking back always made the present seem not so bad, no matter what was going on.

She imagined a woman who might have come to settle in these same woods three hundred years ago, listening to the sounds for the first time: the crack of breaking twigs, the forlorn call of an owl, the wild and terrifying screams of some unknown creature. Had that woman’s husband slept beside her, too, snoring and oblivious? Had she cursed him quietly in the night, wondered how she ever let him talk her into such a thing? The thought made her smile, feel not so alone.