“I’m really not pissed about it. At all. It wasn’t that.” He was a bit surprised himself at how untempted he’d been. “Fillory is who I used to be, but I’m somebody different now.”

“I admit that you might possibly not be deluding yourself about that. Though it does beg the question, who the hell are you?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

She considered that.

“Maybe the answer’s in there,” she said.

Alice indicated the door. It wasn’t a grand or even particularly unusual-looking door, though it was handsome enough: tall and narrow, made of weathered wood painted a pale green. It was the kind of thing you’d find leaning up against the back wall of a vintage furniture store.

“Well,” she said, “if we fuck up our lives completely we can always go crawling back to Eliot.”

“Right,” Quentin said. “We’ll always have that.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“You do know we’re not going out anymore, right?”

“I do know that.”

“I don’t want you to have the wrong idea.”

“I really don’t have any ideas at all. Right or wrong.”

That last part wasn’t strictly true. He had a lot of ideas, of both kinds, most of them about Alice. But he could keep them to himself for a little longer.

As soon as he was back in New York Quentin had thrown himself right back into the process of making a new land. He knew right away that he was going to try it again. He’d thought that particular dream was gone forever, after he used the last of Mayakovsky’s coins, but now that he had the seedpod from the Far Side it seemed worth a try at least. He didn’t have Rupert’s book anymore, or the page either, but he was pretty sure he knew them by heart; at this point he doubted he could forget them if he tried.

And he had Alice to help him. She seemed content to stay in the townhouse for now, and even seven years out of practice she was a better magician than he’d ever been, or ever would be. She kibitzed.

Whatever came out of it, it was good for him and Alice to have a project to do together. It took some of the pressure off. It was a chance to get to know each other again, and for that matter for Alice to get to know herself again. She still had a lot of healing to do, and they needed something to talk about that wasn’t of life-or-death importance, something to bicker over, something concrete to focus on other than their own bruised, confused feelings.