Cormac’s room is the same as I remember it from childhood, even though he’s been dead for over six months. I don’t linger, because the smell of pipe tobacco and his awful cinnamon candies is so overpowering that my memory feels like it’s going to leak out my brains.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, I open the door to Kit’s room. A stripped double bed, one bare night stand, the door to the empty wardrobe hanging open. Picked clean. I keep my eyes from the rust coloured spots staining the green carpet in the far corner, and don’t go past the doorway.

“Kit definitely hasn’t been here,” I call, backing out of the bedroom and into the kitchen where Isla is waiting for me.

I was always envious of Kit’s room because it’s right in the heart of the house. It was his father’s before him, and probably Cormac’s at some point as well, and it has the best light and the biggest bed. It’s right off the kitchen where Kit and I used to congregate late at night when we were supposed to be in bed, hiding under the table with torches and books. And later, when we were older and Owen came to live with us, it’s where we would meet up to eat Nutella out of the jar and snort quietly, trying not to wake Cormac.

Owen dyed my hair green here when we were fifteen, and the dye seeped into the gnarled oak of the table and the pine floor and splattered across the walls. He said the kitchen looked like it had been hit by tree jizz.

It’s where Kit kissed me the first time, when I was seventeen and falling apart and he was the only thing in my world that made sense.

That’s not the kitchen I’m standing in now, though. The walls are the same, the furniture is the same, but something is different. Something feels off.

Things are flickering at the corner of my vision. There are dirty cups stacked in the sink, but when I look closer, it’s just a lone sunbeam. Boots kicked off by the door are actually a stack of boxes when I blink. Every corner seems to shudder with things that are there and not there. Like I’m looking through two worlds and seeing them collide.

“Kit doesn’t live here,” Isla says. She’s standing in the doorway, square in the frame of the green Dutch door that leads from the kitchen to the outside. Cormac marked our height there until we were eleven and then got too lazy to keep going once I started sprouting. There’s no height markers now, though. “He hasn’t lived here in years. He moved right after you left.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I feel slightly nauseated, like the walls are moving and the corners are crooked, but I know they’re not. It’s just me. It’s just whatever is wrong with me, it has to be. There’s no reason why a house could be wrong. I blink twice and shake my head. “Why didn’t we go straight to his house?”