Marge stood perched on the lip of her desk facing the door. She was barely recognizable as the woman Peter had first encountered with popcorn shelving her white shirt the day of his interview. But this wasn’t because death had taken her. She was snug inside a red cable-knit sweater. The floppy ears of a trapper hat framed the apples of her ruddy cheeks. At her waist, she wore a leather toolbelt kitted out with knives, hammers and screwdrivers all weighed down at the hip by bundles of suede pouches for nails. On the floor to the side of Marge’s desk, her work shirt, pants and dickie bow lay strewn next to a sleeping bag and pillow. The sleeping bag had been slept in. A frying pan on a camping stove had been used recently and the smell of bacon hung inside the office, fusing with the familiar scent of log smoke Peter knew from home, coming from Marge’s clothes.

Marge sighed. “That’s one way to go about getting promotion.”

“Sorry?” said Peter. Then he remembered he was holding a knife. “Oh, this? No, it’s just that I …”

Marge took a sip from the tin cup she was holding and Peter noticed an old Yellowstone patch sewn into the shoulder of her sweater.

“You’re wearing your park clothes,” he said.

“You should leave.”

“And you’ve been sleeping in here.”

“Your powers of observation astound me.”

Peter stooped to pick the dickie bow up off the floor and held it in the flat of his palm.

“When I first came here, you told me that survival didn’t just look like a bloodied knife in the hand. You meant it looked like this, didn’t you?”

“What does that matter now?”

“You meant it looked like getting by.”

Marge gazed down into the contents of her tin cup and a moment passed in silence. For the first time since they’d met, this didn’t seem to create a chasm for all their differences to tumble into, but relief now that the things they were saying to each other didn’t only exist to hide the pain of the truth, that they both missed home.

“I used to spend my days in Yellowstone mending the boards,” said Marge after a while. “Acid in the pools and geysers corrodes the nails. They’ll dissolve right in front of you if you don’t keep your beady eye on ’em. But you know what? I could spend whole afternoons just walking the western rim around the cabins and never once see the same burst of bright water. No two days are alike with the geysers.”

“I was there with Cooper not so long ago. Just before we came here.”

Marge looked up, her eyes suddenly bright. “Yes. Then you already know.”

“I do.”

“The geysers. Surprise you, don’t they?”

“Yes. They do.”