“But everything was fine,” he manages to say. “Everything was so good—you didn’t even give it a chance. The apartment is still ours. And the couch—”

She reaches up and rubs her neck, which is bruised a faint purple. “I just can’t,” she says. “I’m sorry. I really am, even if you don’t believe me.”

“But it was only a dream,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “But I was there. I was really there.”

“What about the apartment?” he says. It is all he can find to say.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and then gently shuts the door.

Back at the apartment, he unpacks the rest of her things. He hangs her blouses in the closet and puts her shoes on the shoe rack, allowing each item to fill his head with a different memory. Her perfumes go on a little mirrored tray she inherited from her grandmother the spring before. He cannot help but spray some of her favorite scent onto his wrist, which he brings to his nose for the remainder of the day. Soon, the apartment belongs to the both of them again. Her favorite coffee mug sits on the end table, arguing for her imminent return. Her notebooks are stacked on the kitchen table. Her mother’s china is in the display cabinet.

Thursday arrives too soon. When he leaves the apartment, he does so reluctantly. He has grown fond of the space, of seeing his and Alice’s things comingling on the shelves and in the cabinets and the drawers. He’s sprayed the couch cushions with her perfume, and every afternoon he takes a long, dreamless nap.

When he arrives at his parents’ house, they are alarmed to find that Alice is not with him; he has not told them about the dream, about Ramona. He is, in turn, alarmed to find that his parents have both grown younger since he last saw them. His mother has dyed her hair the color of a rose and found a new kind of makeup that makes her skin look dewy and soft. Roy has lost fifteen pounds by eliminating desserts—a fact that this mother brings up at random intervals, chanting, Fifteen pounds! Fifteen pounds! Can you believe it? as she pats Roy’s stomach. Roy is back in the clothes he wore when Elliot was in high school, the plaid shirts tucked into tight blue jeans, a kind of urban cowboy look that Elliot tried and failed to mimic as an adult, opting instead for an endless combination of earth-tone T-shirts and khakis, wool sweaters, and boat shoes.

“So is Alice coming later in the weekend?” his mother eventually asks. She has never liked Alice, whom she once caught checking the price tag on a bottle of wine Roy bought for dinner. Elliot tried to convince her that Alice had merely liked the wine and was checking to see if it was something they could afford for themselves, but of course his mother didn’t buy this. If there was one thing his mother believed in, it was her ability to read other people. As the story went, she’d known his father was sick before he’d even felt symptoms; she was the one who told him to go to the doctor, to get the scans. She had also known that Roy, one of Elliot’s father’s best friends, would wait exactly a year before confessing his love to her.