“Why is she the oracle on it?” I can hear the peevishness of my tone. It makes me feel mean and small. And guilty—I promised to be civil. Even if Carrie is lying to me, it was still a promise.

“Because she knows more about it than the rest of us, I guess.” It’s not an evasion but it’s not exactly the most forthcoming of answers.

“And what does she say is special about it?” I’m overcompensating now, trying to make myself sound open, nonjudgmental.

His lips curve upward in an echo of his shoulders. “Lots, but it’ll all be too woolly for you.” He’s definitely teasing me this time.

“Try me anyway.”

“Well. It’s about time . . . Time is different there, she says. It moves at a different pace. She thinks . . .”

“What?”

“She thinks . . .” He makes a small movement with his fingers, as if he’s reluctantly yielding. “She thinks it might be folded. Time, I mean. Like, I don’t know, a long sheet of paper. But she thinks it’s folded there. Multiple times. So that different times touch one another.”

I stare at him. “You’re kidding.” But I think uneasily about how I’ve been thrown by the passage of time in the Manse, how my own sense of it passing and the movement of the hands of my watch can be so different.

“I told you that you wouldn’t like it.” There are crinkles at the corners of his eyes. I can’t tell if it’s my consternation that amuses him, or that he had correctly predicted it.

“The woman who can’t tell a minute from an hour has a theory that involves time? And you believe her?”

“I believe that she believes it. She sees things differently to everyone else. And who knows . . . Anyway, you don’t have to believe everything your friends believe. You just have to believe in them.”

“You know that’s kind of nuts, right?”

“Believing in your friends?” He’s teasing me again. It creates intimacy—as if any more were needed given we’ve just finished a candlelit dinner à deux. I ignore him, and after a second he goes on. “Is it, though? It’s no more nuts than believing in God, or homeopathy, or that you’ll have seven years’ bad luck if you smash a mirror.”

“But those aren’t measurable. Time at the Manse is. It’s not like I spend a day there and five minutes passes elsewhere.”

“She says it sort of lurches to get back in sync. It’s like the other times that touch there drag on it a bit. Like there’s resistance.”