Vera stared up at every building on the drive from Boston. She’d been expecting a smaller New York, maybe? But everything here looked so much older. It was like watching a movie or being in Europe or something.

When they pulled onto Iris’s street, Vera gaped. Around them were huge, old houses that clearly had always sheltered a single family, that had existed for a hundred years, and they were beautiful houses, surrounded by beautiful trees, the opposite of sterility or cookie cutter suburb numbness. The street gave off this quiet, warm vibration, like it had always been full of humans like Iris’s parents who were going up, up, up. In all of Vera’s tumbles up and down the class ladder, she had not seen anything like it.

When Iris and her mom beckoned her in, Vera drifted through the front door like she was in a dream. She was a tower of a girl in black shorts and a pink T-shirt. The dog nipped her heels and Iris scooped him up. “I’ll give you the tour.”

In the living room, walls lined with books and lamps and no television. The walls painted a cream yellow. And upstairs, Iris’s bedroom. A full bed with crisp sheets, eggshell-coloured curtains with air blowing lightly through them. Heavy patterned blankets. A rolltop desk in the corner. A wooden chair.

There was an alternate life where the two of them had been making love in this room for years.

When Vera was a kid, this storybook brand of life seemed distant and far away. Not impossible, as Vera’d been a hopeful kid, just—distant. When she was a teenager, and her mom was doing well, it seemed close enough, but the growing realization that she wanted to be a lady made such bounty seem impossible while also, well, wanting to live. And then, for those brief shining few months, when she and Iris were actually dating, Vera thought it was in her grasp, that she could have it all, that a beautiful new twenty-first-century dream was making lives possible that before were unthinkable.

She had forgotten about that dream. But here it was. Iris had grown up in this room with its airy curtains. If Vera had been a different person, just a little bit of a different person, she might have a key to this house already. Their mothers might already be friends. This house might be a getaway for Vera and Iris on weekends and the dog might recognize Vera on sight. Her old self could be walking up to the gate right now in tousled hair, panties beneath her big black jeans, waving to the neighbours and letting the dog out, waiting patiently with a scooper as the sun set behind the house across the way. There’s Jim from next door. The dog barks. “Hello sir, welcome back. Where’s Iris?” “Hello, Jim. She had to take the later bus. But she’ll be here soon.” “Come have a drink if you like.” “Thanks, but I’m getting dinner ready.” Good boy. (I wish there were more men in the world like you, not less.)