I drop to my knees and greet her, kissing her a million times and taking in her familiar scent.

I go around the back, Dido staying right at my heels, unwilling to leave me. I leave my suitcase on the porch and walk through the enormous open doors that lead to the living room, where I see Grayson sitting in front of an absolute cornucopia of junk food. I may be in a state of misery and confusion, but even I can tell that it’s a pretty hilarious amount of trash.

He sits up, and I see that he’s eating cake straight out of the butter-yellow Porto’s Bakery box. Really committing to the weight gain thing. I wonder if he’s choosing to forget that they could do it with prosthetics.

On the screen before him I see that he’s watching Charade.

“Babe!” he says. “Welcome home! How was it?”

Babe. More confirmation that I’m me again. Whatever that means.

“It was good,” I say, obviously not even getting close to the truth. “Looks like the carbo-loading thing is going well.”

“I know, right? Look, I’ve got the belly goin’,” he says, pointing at what is inarguably still a very lean abdomen. “Watching some Hitchcock.”

I glance at the screen. “This isn’t a Hitchcock movie. Stanley Donen directed it.”

Grayson looks at me, confused, then back at the screen.

I sigh, go to the fridge, and pull out a bottle of green juice from Pressed Juicery. I always feel depleted after a flight, but obviously, this time, I feel weirder than ever.

“I’m going to sit by the pool for a bit,” I say. Apparently melancholic sunbathing is my go-to activity when grieving.

I go upstairs and put on my bikini, feeling startled once again by my slimmer physique, my unfamiliar face. Dido pants beside me.

I stop at the freezer on my way to the pool and pull out a tub of Grayson’s Van Leeuwen ice cream. I grab a spoon, but don’t bother with a bowl, and leave the green juice behind.

I sit outside, eating the vanilla ice cream in the warm sunshine, in a beautiful life that no longer feels like my own and that maybe never did. I look up Cairdeas Pub and only find results related to the two words individually. When I type in Avalon at the end, I still get nothing relevant. Avalon has different businesses than the ones I would recognize.

I do this with every imaginable combination of things I saw and experienced there. Looking for the needle in the haystack that tells me what I found was real.

But I find nothing. I knew I wouldn’t.

How can it be? How can any of it be?