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every reason under the sun for a night-light. The darkness was solid and wet and unforgiving. There were no streetlights outside the Burkhardts’ house, and Natalie pulled the covers around her face as much as she could without smothering herself.
    Creatures of the night waited for her to move or show fear; they thrived on it. Even at age seven, she understood this. Monsters wanted to see her fear. She lay stiff and unmoving, frozen in place, praying to live until daybreak. When enough of the dense night had dissipated to convince her that the dawn was emerging, sometime around 5:00 A.M. , she could afford to move and soften her body. Then she slept, only to be startled awake two hours later by Mrs. Burkhardt.
    â€œTime for school. Get up, Miss Sleepyhead.”
    Did other children live with this same danger each night, living one breath away from the monsters that threatened to rip them to pieces? Mr. and Mrs. Burkhardt had each other, and Natalie knew they fell asleep to the blue light of the small television set in their bedroom. She longed to sleep on their floor, to slip along the baseboards so that she could be in the light with them. She craved it the way she had craved food in the other family. If she could only have the smallest bit of light, she’d be safe and she could sleep.
    Natalie found pillow-padded nooks and crannies in the classroom where she could sleep for precious moments until the teacher came looking for her. There was a tunnel in the play structure where she could curl into a ball and fall asleep to the safe hum of fluorescent lights and the voice of her teacher and the other children. At the Burkhardts’, she began to hide in the house long before bedtime; sometimes she turned into a flat piece of paper and slid under the couch. Other times she hid behind the big chairs in the living room, tucking her head into her knees. She only vaguely recalled the screaming and spitting when the Burkhardts found her and had to carry her to her bedroom.
    T he trick with darkness was to become the boss, to own it, to have control over it. Now, at age eighteen, Natalie loved the absoluteness of the darkness, the density of it, the way it dared her to lay open her secrets. When she moved to her own apartment in Worcester after the emancipation, she did not turn on her lights for the first week. The first night left her huddled in a corner, her cell phone gripped tight, a flashlight in her pocket pressed to her belly. She dared the creatures of the night to show their ugly faces, and when they did not, she uncurled her spine. As long as she made the rules, darkness was unable to slide its damp tongue along her neck. This place was hers, and she could choose whether to turn on the lights or not. She steeled herself to join in with the terrors of the night. She showered in the dark, walked the perimeter of the small apartment in the dark. This place was hers; it lacked the monsters of other places. She had checked every closet, under the bed, every shelf, and she had rubbed her hand along every crevice. This was a place where she could live in the dark because she chose to.

Chapter 5
    R ocky had owned one house, and that had been with Bob. She had been thirty-one when they bought their house, and she had wondered if she was old enough or smart enough to buy a house. All along, however, Bob had said, “It’s only wood and mortar.” Together they had purchased the house in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains.
    They had a friend from Boulder, Colorado, who had visited them, and he asked, “Aren’t the Berkshires really foothills themselves?” And it was true: compared to the Rockies, with their sharp peaks and ridges, the Berkshires were rubbed down like half-eaten muffins, dotted with thousands of acres of white birches.
    Rocky was now a newly minted thirty-nine, and she was looking at the house on Peaks Island, the one that had sat vacant and uncared for. If she bought it, she