Peter ran, slip-sliding across the ice to Boulder. He jumped up on to the wooden jetty, causing the snow to spring from the boards, and dashed up the steps on to the porch. He flung the mesh screen door open and bundled inside.

The chalet was dark and it was cold. Peter watched his breath plume across the hearth, but that was practically all he could make out. The plaid couch that he and Darlene had spent so much time snuggled up on over the years was just a dark mass against the light stain of the timber floorboards. He ran his fingertips over the back of the couch feeling for the familiar bristle of the weave across his skin. But it was a stranger to him now. The hours they’d spent here together chatting, gossiping, and then, when Peter was older, talking endlessly about Cooper, seemed to belong to another lifetime.

The screen clattered back into place. Peter returned to the door, feeling for the notches in the frame that had scored his height since he was a toddler. But even they seemed smoothed over. Erased somehow. Everything that had once been good here had faded. Only the white of the animal skulls mounting the far wall were clear inside the darkness like the moon at night. It was quiet, too. Peter’s throat tightened and for the darkest moment, a small part of him wished he’d never unearthed the truth about the Returnees so that everyone could’ve carried on being happy, living inside the lie and a home that was never meant to be theirs.

Peter parted the crack in the curtains to look across the lake. One by one, the lights over at Six Little Fishes went out. Tokala had made it. And a short while later his little red ski jacket broke free of the snowy pines and dashed off towards the northernmost islands. Peter let the curtain go and felt the dread of the wait burrow deep inside the pit of his stomach.

He noticed that one of the many skulls Darlene had mounted on the far wall wore strange antlers. The animal’s own pair had been replaced by the bones of two human arms which jutted from the moose’s skull, with fingers that fanned like winter branches. She’d probably yanked them from the arm sockets of a Restless One. But now he thought on it, he had no way of knowing who they might have belonged to.

Next to the moose was another skull. A deer. The forehead was tilted forward so the ragged bone of the muzzle pointed down. The beast’s hollow eye sockets seemed to glare. Next to it, with its shaggy head mounted on a board, was some poor bison. But Peter’s eyes returned to the deer skull because it did something it shouldn’t have. It stepped away from the wall.