“So what do you think?” asked Alice. “Should we forget it? We should just forget it, shouldn’t we?”

“You go first. What do you think?”

“No, I want you to go first.”

“Ladies first.”

“Okay, fine,” said Alice. She took a breath and looked at the house, imagining fresh paint, a mowed lawn, a toddler running around in circles. It was madness, of course. It would take them years to fix it all up. They didn’t have the money. They were both working full-time. They didn’t even own a car! They had agreed they would not buy a house that needed anything but superficial renovations.

She said, “I want it.”

Nick said, “I want it, too.”

Alice was in seventh heaven. Everywhere she looked there was something new and wonderful to see. The big square sandstone pavers leading up to the veranda (Nick’s idea); the glossy white wooden window frames with glimpses of cream-colored curtains; the pink bougainvillea climbing frothily up the trellis at the side of the veranda (she could swear she’d only just thought of that idea the other day—“We’ll have our breakfast there and pretend we’re on a Greek island,” she’d told Nick); even the front door, for heaven’s sake—at some point they must have finally got around to stripping it back and painting it.

“We had a list,” she said to Elisabeth. “Do you remember our list? It was three foolscap pages of things we needed to do to the house. There were ninety-three things on that list. It was called “The Impossible Dream.” The last thing on that list was “white stone driveway.” She bent down and picked up a smooth white stone and showed it to Elisabeth in the palm of her hand. Had they crossed everything off on that list? It was nothing short of a miracle. They’d achieved the Impossible Dream.

Elisabeth smiled tiredly. “You made a beautiful home—and wait till you see inside. I assume you’ve got your keys in your backpack there.”

Without needing to think, Alice bent down and pulled out a fat jangle of keys from a zippered pocket at the side of the backpack. The key ring was a tiny hourglass; she knew where it would be, but she had never seen it before.

She and Elisabeth walked up onto the veranda. It was beautifully cool after the heat. Alice saw a set of cane chairs with blue cushions (she loved that shade of blue) and a half-empty glass of juice sitting on a round table with a mosaic top. Automatically, she went over and picked up the glass, hefting her backpack over her one shoulder; she kicked against something with her foot and saw it was a black-and-white soccer ball. It rolled away and hit the wheel of a child’s scooter lying on its side, with shiny ribbons tied around the handles.

“Oh,” she said in sudden panic. “The children. Are the children in there?”

“They’re with Nick’s mother. It’s his weekend for the kids. Nick is back from Portugal tomorrow morning. So he’ll drop them back to you Sunday night, as usual.”

“As usual,” repeated Alice faintly.

“Apparently that’s your usual procedure,” said Elisabeth apologetically.

“Right,” said Alice.

Elisabeth took the glass of orange juice from Alice’s unresisting fingers. “Shall we go inside? You probably need to lie down for a while. You still look so pale.”

Alice looked around her. Something was missing.

“Where are George and Mildred?” she said.

“I don’t know who George and Mildred are,” said Elisabeth in a gentle, dealing-with-crazy-person-here voice.

“That’s what we called the sandstone lions.” Alice gestured at the empty spot on the veranda. “The old lady left them for us. We love them.”

“Oh. Yes, I think I remember them. I expect you got rid of them. Not quite the look for you, Alice.”

Alice didn’t understand what she meant. She and Nick would never have got rid of the lions. “Just off to the shops, George and Mildred,” they’d say as they left the house. “You’re in charge.”

Nick would know. She would ask him. She turned around and lifted the keys to the door. The locks were new to her. There was a solid-looking gold dead bolt, but her fingers instantly found the right key, holding down the door handle and pushing with her shoulder against the door in a practiced, smooth movement. It was extraordinary the way her body knew how to do things—the mobile phone, the makeup, the lock—without her mind remembering her ever having done them before. She was about to comment on this to Elisabeth, but then she saw the hallway and she couldn’t speak.

“Okay, listen to me, because I am a visionary,” Nick had said standing in the musty, dark hallway in the first shell-shocked week after they’d moved into the house. (His mother had cried when she saw the house.) “Imagine sunlight flooding through this hallway because of the skylights we’ll put here, here, and here. Imagine all this wallpaper gone and the walls painted something like a pale green. Imagine this carpet gone somewhere far, far away and the floorboards varnished and shiny in the sunlight. Imagine a hall table with flowers and letters on a silver tray, you know, as if they’ve been left there by the butler, and an umbrella stand and a hat stand. Imagine photos of our adorable children lined along the hallway—not those horrible portrait shots—but real photos of them at the beach or whatever or just picking their noses.”

Alice had tried to imagine but she was suffering from a bad cold and one nostril was stinging so badly it was making her eyes water and they had two hundred and eleven dollars in the bank and twenty minutes ago they’d just discovered the house needed a new hot water system. All she could say was “We must have been out of our minds,” and Nick’s face had changed and he’d said, desperately, “Please don’t, Alice.”

And now here was the hallway exactly as he’d described it: the sunlight, the hall table, the floorboards shining liquid gold. There was even a funny old antique hat stand in the corner covered with straw hats and baseball caps and a few draped beach towels.

Alice walked slowly down the hallway, not stopping, only touching things with a vague caressing fingertip. She looked at the framed photos: a fat baby crawling on hands and knees in the grass, gazing huge-eyed up at the camera; a fair-haired toddler laughing uncontrollably next to a little girl in a Spider-Man suit with her hands on her hips; a skinny brown boy in baggy wet board shorts, caught ecstatically midair, bright-blue sky behind him, arms and legs flailing in every direction, droplets of water on the camera lens as he crashed down into unseen water. Every photo was another memory Alice didn’t have.