He just got this car and already there’s a full life he’s lived in here that I haven’t been part of. I don’t think I like it.

I repress a demand to know where we’re going. Outside my window the houses have stopped whirring by in dense packs and pare down to sparse flickers every quarter mile. Brown fields rear up taller and wilder. The sky is a white mist that stretches for eternity, unnaturally bright given that it’s evening. The road careens right, swallowing us up between walls of towering maple, scarlet leaves ablaze. We rumble over a potholed bridge and my teeth chatter.

This is it, then. He’s going to drive us both off a bridge. Voldemort and Harry Potter’s quandary pops into my head: Neither can live while the other survives.

Nicholas slows down and leans forward just a hair, paying close attention. I don’t even see the driveway until after we’ve made the turn, it’s so obscured by woods. Gravel crunches under the tires of Upside Down Nicholas’s car, leading us along a winding path to a house on a hill.

It’s surrounded by a forest of blue spruce and Eastern white pine, which I bet looks like a pretty Christmas wonderland when it snows. The front yard hasn’t been raked in a century, layers upon layers of dead maple leaves rising flush with a pile of chopped wood carefully stacked. There’s an ancient car with a tarp pulled over it, tires half sunk into the earth.

“That’ll be gone in a couple days,” Nicholas tells me when he sees what I’m looking at after we both exit the car. “He has to find someone with a hitch to help him haul it.”

“Who?”

I don’t think he hears me over the crunch of leaves underfoot. It’s firmly packed in some areas and loose in others, so I have to choose my steps wisely or I’ll break my ankle. I catch my balance on a little evergreen sapling. It’s a runt of a thing, malnourished and crooked. “Aww.” I brush the needles. “It’s a Charlie Brown tree.”

He makes an indulgent sound. Hum. I want to pinch him. He’s doing that thing again, where he belittles what I’m saying even if I’m right.

“Before we go in,” he says, halting my stride with a hand on my sleeve, “what do you think of it from the outside?”

“What?” I blink up at him.

His arm gestures to the house. I follow the swing. It’s … a house. Old, probably. Dark brown strips of horizontal wood and spring green shutters, one hanging crookedly. A deep front porch with tipsy steps illumined by the pinprick of a glowing doorbell. The chimney’s a column of lumpy round stones and the windows are the merry orange squares of a Tiffany lamp. A high tide of leaves swells up against the siding on the eastern wall, all the way up to a wide leaded glass window that must be the living room.

“It’s fine, I guess. Whose is it?”

“Ours.”

Ours. It echoes. Insensible gibberish. Undeniably false.

I snap my fingers and freeze time. Wheel to face him dead-on. The creature inhabiting Nicholas’s body looks down at me with the most peculiar mixture of pleasure and solemnity, and I get the feeling he is wide, wide awake while I am just beginning to stir from my hibernation. He’s skipped his contacts again, eyes sparking with intensity behind slate-gray frames. The ends of his hair curling out from his hat are so soft-looking, I almost want to touch but snatch my hand back because it feels too forward. He’s my fiancé, but not. I don’t know what we are. Who we are.

I unfreeze time and he smiles. “Welcome home.”

A Renaissance painting of us invents itself in midair, capturing my bafflement and Nicholas’s triumph. The second hand trickles at the slow drip of two million years, and then—

“What do you mean, ‘ours’?”

“I bought it.” His eyes never leave mine.

This—

But—

I—

!!!

The world flips as Nicholas turns our mind game on its head. I’m lost. It makes no sense whatsoever that he would buy a house and expect me to move in. We’ve been fighting for custody of the squat white rental. We’ve been fighting to push the other one to wave a white flag and get lost forever.

“Are you malfunctioning?” he asks, mildly entertained.

He’s twelve steps ahead of me. He’s twelve steps above. Behind. Everywhere. I don’t know where to turn and I don’t know what his objective is. He’s right, I’m malfunctioning. My circuit board is smoking. I have a house.

No, I don’t. I hastily remind myself that I don’t have anything that’s part Nicholas. He doesn’t belong to me, so neither does this. He’s termite Midas. Everything he touches turns to rot.

The only lucid thing I can think to say is, “I take it you won the coin toss.”

“Yes.”

“But.” Speech is not coming easily. My brain is continuously rejecting messages coming in from my eyes and ears as impossible. “A whole house?”

“I tried to buy half of one, but couldn’t find any that are gaping open on the side or missing a roof.”

I barely hear the joke. “How. Why. I don’t—”

“I bought it from one of the guys you work with. Leon. I ran into him a few days ago and got to talking about the sort of place I wanted to live in, and he told me about wanting to move out of the place he’s in now, and we realized we both wanted the same thing and could help each other. Turns out, he’s actually pretty cool. He let me play with his bow saw and we’ve got plans to build a couple of chairs.”

“Leon?” That’s what I’m stuck on right now. “You bought this house from Leon? Leon Duncan?”

He chuckles. “I’ll let him know you haven’t forgotten his last name yet. He’ll be shocked.”

Great, they’ve been swapping stories about how rude I am. Maybe blanking on Leon’s last name is the reason he didn’t say a word to me about this all day. What a Judas.

“He knew this was the surprise and he let me think I was about to get murdered!”

“You really need to stop telling your coworkers I’m out to murder you.” Irritation flits across his features. “Doesn’t give me a good rep.”

“We’ve never discussed the kind of house we’d buy together,” I sputter. “I wasn’t involved here at all.”