Ivan looked around her porch as Cam locked up. He lifted the fake plant under her mailbox and shook it, rattling the spare key inside its hollow pot.

“You weren’t lying about leaving a key for me,” he said with mild surprise and a hint of a smile.

“That’s not how you got in?”

“Just picked the lock.” Ivan set the plant back in its place. “You should upgrade. It wasn’t hard.”

The rain had let up for the moment, but the sky remained ominous. Cam reckoned the sunset was still two hours out. She wanted more darkness while they walked out in the open. But they would reach the cover of trees soon enough, and anyway, she had other matters to focus on. For one thing, it wouldn’t take much to recognize her even without one of her wigs. She hunched forward a little, trying to adopt a slouched posture. For another, Ivan had a slow, unbothered gait her nervous energy threatened to outpace every time her attention shifted. The last thing she wanted was to have him walking behind her.

Ideally, she’d have him in front, where she could keep a constant eye on him. Study his movements and body language closely. But he didn’t know where they were going. He wasn't asking, either. Cam wondered if this was a sign of his total faith in her, or of an indifference. His plans for how the night would end might not have changed. There was every chance he’d only decided to go along for the ride so far to make her believe she still had hope of surviving. To toy with her.

After walking in silence for the better part of a half hour, they left the sidewalk, wading across tall grass and thick mud to reach the line of tall young pine trees that was the forest’s edge. The same forest Cam had meant to camp in that weekend, the same one her mother had brought her to countless times, albeit on the opposite side. She laid a palm on the first tree she came across and inwardly gave thanks for their shelter and concealment.

Cam stretched her back. She slid her bag off to take out a bag of mixed nuts and a water bottle. Her hand brushed the hard bone attached to Ivan’s mask, and she suppressed a shudder. “Want any?”

“Already ate,” he said. “I’d take some water.”

“Biggest compartment,” she said, handing him the backpack. Cam took a long drink, shoveled three fistfuls of mixed nuts into her mouth, washed it down with more water. “What do you think of the woods?”

He finished taking a drink. “These woods, or any woods?”

“Any.” She took her bag back and picked up the pace, waving him to keep up.

“Never thought about it.”

“It’s a place of tremendous spiritual energy. We would do well to observe and absorb it as much as we can. This is where we seek balance, Ivan. You’re here to return to yourself after the revelations you’ve had tonight. So then,” she said with an inviting smile, “why don’t you tell me who you are?”

He shrugged at first, then met her eyes with a look of remembering to take things seriously. “What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with how we got here. We can work backwards from there. How did you come to be inside my apartment this afternoon?”

“Saw you on the train. Monday afternoon- no, Tuesday. Followed you home.” Cam focused on her breathing as he went on, “Wednesday and Thursday you left the same time, came home pretty much the same time. Easy. Friday, today, you left, I broke in and waited. Should’ve known something was up the first thing you said when you found me.”

She honestly couldn’t remember. Cam was too disturbed by the image of him hiding in her apartment for the better part of six hours, waiting for her. He’d just said he already ate. He’d eaten her food.

“When you told me the spirits expected me to come earlier,” he clarified.

Cam had actually said the spirits were expecting him at a different time, but Ivan had since rewritten it in his mind to match what he knew. She simply nodded.

Ivan explained, “I was gonna do this yesterday. Got roped into something before I could get in. So, what, yesterday you knew I was late? Or did you think it wasn’t happening?”

“I thought I’d done something wrong,” she improvised. “Upset the spirits, made them change their mind.”

“Bad feeling,” Ivan guessed. “You been expecting me a long time? When’d you first know all this, I mean?”

At length, Cam answered, “I’ve been preparing for this night for years. I didn’t know exactly what would happen, and I didn’t know anything about you. The spirits only give me what information I need when I need it. But I knew I was being called to something.”

With a small nod, Ivan began to look around them, his expression unreadable. Her vagueness seemed to be losing him. It was time to start getting into specifics if Cam wanted to keep up a compelling performance. Letting his mind wander, giving him time to think over everything that had happened so far, could get her killed. “I’m going to tell you a story. Storytelling is an excellent way to seek balance.”

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“I’m listening,” he said unconvincingly.

“I told you before that my mother died when I was young.”

Ivan turned back to her, his attention piqued. He wiped rainwater from his forehead and watched her with interest.

“My father, he didn’t do very well alone. He’d spent most of his life in a relationship of some kind. So it was only a few months after she passed when he brought home a boyfriend. And I was happy for him. Things were so different, remember? It would have been around 2006 or 2007. Not that it’s easy now, but the homophobia was everywhere then. I was really proud of him for coming out as bi and living authentically. It hurt, too, so soon after Mom was gone, but I ignored how I felt and just wanted to be supportive.”

To her surprise, Ivan was still listening. Cam went on, “It started out great. Dennis, the boyfriend, he was charming. A little older, funnier, more confident than Dad. A stabilizing presence. Really nice to me. He didn’t even judge me when he found me holding a seance to talk to my mom. Dad had stopped doing them with me, so I’d been holding my own in secret, and I thought I was in so much trouble when Dennis caught me. I begged him not to tell my dad.”

Cam paused as they passed through a particularly thick patch of trees, navigating the tangle of branches clawing at her coat sleeves. The rain picked up as the trees thinned out again. She readjusted her hat, waited for Ivan to catch up, noted how dark the sky had grown beyond the canopy.

“I wasn’t in trouble,” she resumed telling her story and walking at the same time. “Dennis encouraged me to tell my dad, helped me do it. Then he suggested that we all do a seance together. I was so happy. I’d done everything I could to avoid talking about Mom because I thought I would hurt Dad’s new relationship. Dad seemed like he was really touched by it, too. I think he’d been worried about bringing her up for the same reason.”

Ivan snapped his head in the direction of a sudden crash of leaves, unzipping his jacket. Preparing for a fight, she guessed. Cam told him, “One squirrel always sounds like ten different animals fighting each other. It’s amazing.”

“A squirrel?” he asked incredulously, laughing at himself. “Thought a cougar was gonna jump out.”

“Doubtful.” Cam saw no reason to let him feel entirely comfortable. She added, “Remember, too, that the veil between the living and the dead is thin around us. There is much that may stir here tonight.”

He put his hands in his pockets and nodded.

“Our little ouija board sessions had been therapeutic for us, me and Dad,” Cam picked up where she left off. “We didn’t really expect Mom to answer. We would just say all the stuff we wished we could tell her and move the planchette around for each other, spelling out sweet things like ‘I love you’ and ‘I’m still with you’. But our seance with Dennis was… different.”

An old logging trail came into view, and Cam brought them to it. In better weather, she might have avoided even this seldom-used spot, but the rain would discourage most people from walking through the woods tonight.

“Mom answered us,” Cam recounted. “Really answered. She used her pet name for me and everything. Dad looked at me like I was in trouble, but he could see right away that I was genuinely scared. And I think it scared Dad even more. We said goodbye on the board and locked it away.

“But neither of us could leave it alone for long. We held another seance. When Mom answered again, Dad started crying like I’d never seen before, not even at her funeral. Dennis comforted him through it. I felt bad for not crying, too. It made me realize that I didn’t believe like he did. I wanted to, desperately, but something was wrong and I couldn’t force myself to ignore it. Why now? We’d reached out to her so many times before. Dennis was the only change. She’d said a couple of things he shouldn’t have known, and even more than I wanted to believe she was talking to us, I didn’t want to believe Dennis would do something like that. I mean, to what end? To try to make us feel better? But it would be so, so much worse to believe in a fake version of her than to grieve the real one. I decided to test her.”

Cam paused to roll her neck and shoulders. “How are you doing? Do you feel a sense of balance returning to you?”

“Don’t think so,” he said. “What’ll it feel like?”

“It’s familiar in a very pleasant way, like coming back to a place that you love.”

“No,” he chuckled, “can’t say I feel that.”

“How are your feet?”

“Fine.”

“No blisters? Water in your boots?” It was a good excuse to look him over. His body language hadn’t changed, he still held a glint of curiosity in his tired eyes, still kept pace with her. She didn’t trust any of it.

Ivan shook his head. “Getting dark,” he observed.

Taking out two flashlights from her bag, Cam warned him, “It gets darker. More than you think out here.”

Ivan immediately turned on the flashlight, though it wasn’t doing much just yet. “Stronger than you look,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“Heaviest fucking flashlight they sell,” he laughed. “Carrying these around, and your bag’s packed like we’re living out here from now on. You’re stronger than you look.”

“Thanks,” she said, vastly uncomfortable with his friendliness. As far as she knew, these were just the flashlights one used while camping. Was he trying something on her? Trying to charm her, at this juncture? “So. I set out to put the spirit of my mother to the test.”

“Right.”

“But I couldn’t make it obvious. I didn’t think Dad would let me, if he knew. Besides, I hadn’t decided yet whether I would even tell him if I found out it was all fake. That was too much to think about. I settled on a simple question. I would ask her if she knew what happened to the heart pendant Dad had given me for my birthday. See, I’d broken the latch, and I felt so terrible that I begged her not to tell my Dad. Mom was going to get another chain for me. She died before she got around to it. But I would play it off like I’d lost the necklace and wanted her to help me find it. My real mom would know that wasn’t true. She’d tell me where she’d hidden it. I thought I was being pretty clever,” Cam said with a bitter half-smile.

“For a kid,” Ivan said.

“Maybe. Dennis saw right through me, though. Halfway through our next seance, I asked my question, and the planchette started behaving strangely. It went around the board in circles. I’ll never forget the panic on my Dad’s face when he asked what was happening. Dennis said we’d lost the connection. Things got pretty dark after that. Dad would hardly speak. I felt responsible for hurting him, but at the same time, I knew for certain then that it had all been fake. And Dennis knew that I knew.”

At the sound of footsteps ahead, Cam halted. Ivan stepped in front of her, taking a protective stance, and they watched a young woman round the bend along the path.