Teddy chuckled to himself, which was both intolerable and endearing, and Cooper glanced his way. Peter quickly withdrew his hand and for a moment at least, it crossed his mind that he really should be doing the opposite. Cooper was making it so obvious to him that he was finding replacements by turning up late with Becky and giving her his T-shirt, that he should be doing everything he could to show him how much his and Teddy’s friendship was growing too. But he couldn’t bring himself to. While any friendship with Teddy felt like a playdate, Cooper was up all night in the woods with the others. And before that, naked and with himself. Peter saw the mass of dark hair below Cooper’s navel in his mind’s eye, luminous against the glow of his skin. Lower still, and those parts of him that stayed secret. Tears began to well deep inside Peter’s chest. If they broke out, they’d be unstoppable. He pretended to laugh at a joke Teddy didn’t even make. But he needn’t have bothered. Cooper’s hair spilled back across his face and his attention was gone again.

“In previous weeks,” said Terri, walking around the circle, “we’ve workshopped the practical things some of you have started to worry about now we’re getting close to returning. Things that are either completely new to you or in need of a refresher, like how to change electrical fixtures and fittings, budgeting, how to open a bank account if you lost your documents during the exodus to the parks, setting up your bills and making sure that you prioritize paying them and so on and so forth. But tonight, I’d like to spend some time looking at time and how we get through it.”

Whispers broke across the group and shoulders leaned into shoulders as people tried to figure out what Terri meant by that.

“Now, I don’t need to tell you good people that a year out there in the parks passed like five minutes. If we weren’t busy keeping the Dead from our doors, we had the boardwalks and cabins to maintain. And as you all know, the summers, especially in Yellowstone but also up in Glacier and Wranglestone too, were short, bringing winter round all the quicker. And well, then we were just flat-out carving blocks of snow the size of refrigerators from each other’s roofs on a fortnightly basis. But some of you might begin to notice, or perhaps recall, that time can pass quite differently down here.”

“Differently?” came a voice from the group. “Heck, it’s as slow as Val’s … Nope. I don’t got nothin’. Hell, it’s just as slow as Val.”

Val’s eyes peered out from beneath folds of saggy skin. “Was-he-say?”

“But he’s right,” mumbled a voice beside Peter. “Three days passed last week without me seeing a living soul.”