“I’m not an animal person,” I told her as I salted and peppered each individual bite of my eggs. “And besides, a puppy would only get bigger.”

“Well, of course it would, that’s what puppies do,” she said. She leaned forward and copped her singsong Helen voice. “Come on, Stanley, wouldn’t it be nice? A dog is easier than a baby.”

Uneasy, I laughed. I decided to bring out the big guns. Any hint of going off the property would hint at the outside world just enough to finally put the issue to rest. Neither of us had ventured off the property in years.

“Where would we get it, though?” I chewed my food and looked at her meaningfully. “I don’t know of any nearby pet places in town.”

She caught my meaning. She said, “True,” and for a few seconds continued cutting her pancakes. The fingers of relief massaged me.

But then, unbelievably, she said: “I could go get one. I could take your truck.”

I sat up and swallowed, the food suddenly tasting like ashes. “No way,” I finally said. “No. I thought I made that clear. No leaving the property.” I looked at her, mildly disturbed. In that second we were no longer talking as the Ropers. We had slipped back into our other selves. “I would have thought you, of all people, wouldn’t want to go back out there for anything.”

We never referred to the larger world other than as “out there.” We never mentioned any familiar town names or nearby roads.

She just waved me away. “Maybe I’ve changed.” She took a sip of coffee. “Helen wouldn’t be afraid to go to ——” And here she mentioned the name of the town at the foot of the mountain.

I sat back, my alarm increasing by the second, and looked at her, but she only shrugged and made a face like, What do you want from me?

Breakfast was finished in silence.

Since then I’d been too upset to speak to her. I had busied myself with minor projects in the upstairs apartments instead, trying to put the troubling conversation out of my mind. I told myself I would put my foot down next time we saw each other, really let her hear my disapproval. The thing that perhaps most greatly upset me was that she was right—Mrs. Roper wouldn’t have been afraid of the outside world. To refute her statement would, in part, be refuting the whole premise of my project. And the fact that she said it out loud—“Helen wouldn’t be afraid to go to ——”—reminded me of a new, terrifying possibility: by design the characters would act upon their natural impulses, but by doing so within a constructed world whose construction they were aware of, they could transform themselves into alien versions of themselves, doing and saying and wanting things beyond these walls, these streets, this timeline.

But wasn’t that what we had been doing, Helen and I, Rita and Bonnie, ever since she’d arrived? For the past two years we had been warping the Ropers into the version that we most enjoyed for the sake of our own vanity, our own quest for love and comfort, tranquillity. Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, we flouted the rules of this reality, the ones I myself had created, and though we dressed as the Ropers and lived in the Ropers’ apartment, we often spoke and interacted with one another as our other selves, the ones we had met after the storm, the selves that had arrived from a bleaker reality I had spent a lifetime yearning to escape. I had not been as strong as I’d thought, after all.