At first I thought I had miscalculated, and that she was going to refuse, but Krystal, always the relenter, relaxed her shoulders. She took the dishes from me and said, “Sure.”

The smell is what hit me first—the smell of something sweet baking, plus the apple-scented candle Geannie always had burning throughout the season. And fresh pine, too—boughs of it hung from the banister and on the sills, and on the front door itself. The foyer was dark but soft lights were on in other rooms and the music played, and the heater made the air warm and wavy, just like in the before-times, and it was a trap, always a trap. The past was always so close and dangerous.

I stood still, my heart speeding up. My mind was trying to grab hold of something that was running away from me. But what was it, exactly? The air? A smell? A rogue moment that had broken out of the timeline?

Krystal had already shut the door and was walking away from me, not looking back. Suddenly I was alone in the foyer, and I hadn’t seen where she’d gone. I felt small. The house was like a mouth waiting to consume me. I called her name. Nothing. Then I heard her call to me. She sounded so far away. We were floating in a void for a moment, a cloudy, dark place where people call to one another forever and ever.

Something fell on the floor with a large thud. The sound broke me out of the spell and, relieved to have a purpose, I went toward it, into the living room. “Are you okay?” I said as I walked, thinking she had tripped.

But no. It was only one of the village buildings that had fallen over.

The village. The fucking Christmas village. There it was, all forty or sixty or however many buildings, plus the magnetic lake, plus the fake snow, all laid out under the Christmas tree, which was also decked out like it used to be, full of light and color. She had re-created Geannie and Jim’s Christmas experience in total. The only things missing were Geannie and Jim. And Hernan.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Come sit,” Krystal said, not hearing me. She had righted the building and was now sitting on one end of the couch. Gingerly I sat down on the other end, taking all of this in. The song I’d heard playing when I first knocked had finished; she had flipped the record and now “O Little Town of Bethlehem” washed over us with assaultive force. “Hold on,” she said, getting up to turn it down.

“I don’t understand,” I said again as she sat back down. “I thought we had packed this up?” It came out like a scratchy, high-pitched question. I was sweating inside my coat. The thermostat must have been cranked up to 80 degrees.

Krystal looked like she needed the warmth, as thin as she was. She was wearing Geannie’s housecoat again. In fact, now that I was really looking at her, I noticed that she had cut her hair into a bob just like Geannie’s, plus she was wearing Geannie’s bedroom slippers and Geannie’s wedding band. That last detail made me feel sick; Geannie had been wearing it the night of the robbery. Where had Krystal retrieved that from? Police evidence?