I’m still trying to orchestrate plan A, and Nicholas is subverting my efforts with plan C. Only one of us can win, but I’m no longer certain what the winner keeps and what they lose.

My favorite thing about the house that’s mine but not mine is that it’s dim and small and cozy, which doesn’t sound appealing when I put it that way, but each room has a very particular feel to it, which makes my imagination go bonkers.

The living room is exactly where you’d want to relax in a comfy armchair with grandchildren strewn at your feet in a semicircle as you read them old stories of faraway lands. Swashbuckling pirates and flying trains, masked bandits and elvish royalty. The books are leather-bound, spines crackling in your aging hands. You sit quietly in front of a flickering fire with your soul mate as raindrops patter the glass, more contented than a cat stretched out on a windowsill.

The living room is where your grandchildren’s fondest memories of you will be born, and that’s where they’ll always picture you long after you’re gone. Every time they smell wood smoke or hot chocolate, it will pull them back in time to the sound of your voice rising and falling like a melody as you read to them.

“What do you think?” Nicholas asks.

“Hmm.” I saunter past him into the kitchen, dissolving him with my mind powers so I can take it all in without his hovering.

The kitchen is airy and light, with exposed wood beams traversing the ceiling. Copper pots and pans and watering cans dangle from them like wind chimes. Green explosions of ivy burst from planters. The fragrance of freshly baked bread and sun-kissed linens on a clothesline perfume the air. In the summer, this is where you bite into a blackberry and feel the ripe flavors rupture on your tongue. In the spring, you lean over the sink and water the tulips kept in the window planter.

A kitchen witch lives here. She keeps a cauldron in the hearth and lays bundles of dried herbs across the overhead beams. There’s a scrubbed wooden table and mismatched chairs painted all the colors of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Toenails of the family dog go clack-clack-clack on the pine floors and everything about this room makes your heart lift into a smile.

“Doesn’t come with any appliances,” Nicholas says, “but that’s fine.” I stop walking and he accidentally bumps into me from behind. “Whoops. Sorry.”

“You wanna give me some space?”

“Well, you’re not saying anything.”

“I’m talking to myself right now. Give us a minute.”

It’s his turn to mutter “Hmm.” I’m glad when he ducks into the (one and only) bathroom, giving me a break from him.

The drawing room contains three tall, magnificent windows facing the woods out back. The yard beyond grades steeply, providing an excellent view of a pond with a long dock. This is the best room for stargazing. You part the luxurious red velvet curtains and watch a sickle moon arc over the forest, reflecting off the pond. This is where you keep your Christmas tree and a family of nutcrackers on the mantel. The walls are papered in midnight blue with silver foil stars and birch trees. Everything washes gold when the fire’s lit.

A replica of Grand Central Station’s clock is mounted to the newel post of the stairway right outside the drawing room, and in the middle of the night when you pad through the hushed house to curl up in a rocking chair on a thick woven rug, you pass the glowing face of the clock and hear its hands tick. The world is quiet save for the ticking of that clock, and the soft snores of your one true love sleeping upstairs, the rustling toss-and-turn of your small children, and the whispering of branches in the forest.

It.

Is.

Magical.

I can envision all of it so vividly and I want it. I want it bad.

Nicholas enters the drawing room while I’m mentally placing where my stash of sugar cookie and peppermint candles would go and jars me out of my own little world with his voice. “I think I’ll take this room for my office.” He spreads his fingers at the bank of glittering windows. “I’ll put a big-screen TV right there, so I won’t have to divide my time between working and watching football.”

The nutcrackers in my fantasy topple off the mantel and into the fire.

“Ugh.”

“What?” He does a double take at me, then the mantel, which was where my gaze had been fixated. “You don’t like the fireplaces? I figured that’d be one of your favorite parts. There’s forced air, too. We won’t need to light an actual fire to get heat if we don’t want to.”

“The fireplaces are fine,” I reply blandly. I’m surprised my nose doesn’t shoot across the room like Pinocchio. I love those fireplaces more than my blood relatives. I want to nail two mother- and father-sized Christmas stockings over them, next to two child-sized ones. I want to buy a flock of flameless candles and take three hours tediously arranging them just so while a pained Nicholas looks on.

Nicholas studies me, and whatever he sees in my face makes his eyes soften. “Come upstairs?”

“Sure, whatever.”

There are three bedrooms upstairs, largely the same in size and layout. Plain walls, wood floors. The center one’s half a foot narrower than the other two, and a lightbulb goes off in my brain before I can smash it: Nursery.

I’ll never forgive myself for the thought.

“Which room’s mine?” I ask, mostly to provoke him. He’s seen the whole house before, so he doesn’t look at any of it now, keeping his focus pinned on my every reaction. It’s why I’m straining not to react: I can’t let him see how much I love this place. When I enter a room, I think it’s all right. By the time I’m walking out of it, it’s become the best room I’ve ever seen. I’m going to be devastated when I inevitably have to leave. I’ve been living in that white rental all this time like a total idiot.

“Take your pick.”

I can’t discern by his tone whether he’s agreeing to sleep in separate bedrooms. I haven’t slept in our bed since the coin toss, and I’m not about to change that now. I don’t know what would be worse: sleeping with him when I’m trying so hard to push him away, or making a move on him and then having him reject me because he’s trying to push me away. I’m still confused about Nicholas’s endgame here. His strategy’s fuzzy.

“A house like this is full of stories. It should have a name.”