“Good question,” Sisi said. “No idea. Maybe God told her? Look, what I was interested in at the time was Liam. I know why he liked me. Here I was, this South African girl with an American passport, dreadlocks, and cowboy boots, talking about how I was going to get in a rocket and go up in space, just as soon as I could. What man doesn’t like a girl who doesn’t plan to stick around?

“What I don’t know is why I liked him so much. The thing is, he wasn’t really a good-looking guy. He had a nice round English butt. His hair wasn’t terrible. But there was something about him, you just knew he was going to get you into trouble. The good kind of trouble. When I met him his mother was dead. His uncle was dead, too. They weren’t a lucky family. They had money instead of luck. The uncle had never married, and he’d left Liam everything.

“We went out for dinner. We gave each other all the right kind of signals, and then we fooled around some and he said he wanted to take me up to his country house for the weekend. It sounded like fun. I guess I was picturing one of those little thatched cottages you see in detective shows. But it was like this instead.” Sisi gestured around. “Big old pile. Except with video screens in the corners showing mice eating each other and little kids eating cereal. Nice, right?

“He said we were going to go for a walk around the estate. We walked out about a mile through this typical South of England landscape and then suddenly we’re approaching this weather-beaten, rotting stucco house that looked like every ranch house I’d ever seen in a depopulated neighborhood in the Southwest, y’all. This house was all by itself on a green English hill. It looked seriously wrong. Maybe it had looked better before the other one had burned down, or at least more intentionally weird, the way an art installation should, but anyway. Actually, I don’t think so. I think it always looked wrong.”

“Go back,” Mei said. “What happened to the other house?”

“I’ll get there in a bit,” Sisi said. “So there we are in front of this horrible house, and Liam picked me up and carried me across the threshold like we were newlyweds. He dropped me on a rotting tan couch and said, ‘I was hoping you would spend the night with me.’

“I said to him, ‘Here?’ And he said, ‘Here is where I grew up. This is home.’ And now we’re back at the part where Liam and his mother moved into the installation.”

“This story isn’t like the other stories,” Maureen said.