Did she have to go to parties on her own again now?

She remembered that raw sensation she’d felt after previous relationships had ended. For months afterward, it had felt like she’d lost a layer of skin. If she’d felt like that after those meaningless boys, what would she feel like after breaking with Nick? She’d been so cozy in the cocoon of their relationship. She assumed she got to stay there forever.

Alice looked up from her lap, where she’d been fiddling with her bracelet, and saw they were turning into Rawson Street. As she watched the long line of leafy liquid ambers and the car ahead putting on its right-hand indicator to turn into King Street, she felt a sudden sense of horror. Her heart palpitated as if she’d woken up in the middle of a nightmare; something grabbed her throat and squeezed; pure fear rammed her hard against her seat.

She went to reach out for Elisabeth, to touch her arm to let her know that she might be dying, but she couldn’t move. Elisabeth braked and looked left and right to turn onto King Street. Alice was having a heart attack right next to her and Elisabeth didn’t even realize.

They turned the corner and Alice’s heart began to slow. She could breathe again. She made a whooshing sound of relief as air filled her lungs once more.

Elisabeth glanced over at her. “You okay?”

Alice spoke, her voice high. “I felt really, really strange for a moment there.”

“Dizzy? Because I can take you straight back to the hospital right now if you like. It’s no problem.”

“No, no, it’s gone now. It was just—nothing, really.”

The fear had vanished, leaving her weak and shaky as though she’d just stepped off an amusement park ride. What did these huge tidal waves of feeling mean? First there had been that unimaginable grief. Now it was terror.

As they drove down Alice and Nick’s street, she saw a For Sale sign on the house directly opposite theirs. “Oh, are the Pritchetts selling?” she asked.

Elisabeth glanced at the sign and a strange, inscrutable expression crossed her face. “Um. I think they sold years ago. The family who bought it from them is selling it now. So, anyway—” She turned into Alice and Nick’s driveway and pulled on the handbrake. “Home sweet home.”

Alice looked out the window at her house and pressed her hand to her mouth. She threw open the car door and jumped out, the smooth white gravel driveway crunching beneath her shoes. White gravel! “Oh,” she said ecstatically. “Look what we did!”

They first saw the house on a gloomy July day.

“Oh dear,” they both said simultaneously when they pulled up in front of it, and then as they sat there in Nick’s sister’s car, gazing at it for a few seconds, they both made rising “ummm?” sounds, which meant, “But maybe it’s got something?”

It was a ramshackle two-story Federation house with a sagging roof, blankets hanging in the windows instead of curtains, and an overgrown junkyard lawn. It looked sad and battered, but if you squinted your eyes, you could see the stately home it had once been.

The For Sale sign out front said POTENTIAL PLUS, and everyone knew what that meant.

“Too much work,” said Nick.

“Far too much,” agreed Alice, and they gave each other sidelong suspicious looks.

They got out of the car and stood shivering on the street, waiting for the real estate agent to arrive. The front door of the house creaked open and a bent old lady wearing a man’s jumper over a checked skirt, long socks, and sneakers came shuffling up the footpath toward the letterbox.

“Oh God,” said Alice in agony. It was bad enough when you caught a glimpse of a harried middle-aged couple rushing out to their car to drive away before you went stomping through their house, making disparaging remarks about their choice of carpet. It broke Alice’s heart when she saw the things they did to try to make their house sell—the fresh flowers, the kitchen counters with wet streaks from where they’d been vigorously wiped, the coffee plunger and cups placed just so on the living room table to make it look homey. Nick would snort cynically when people lit scented candles in the bathroom as if that’s the way they always lived, but Alice was always touched by their hopefulness. “Don’t go to all that effort to try and impress me,” she wanted to tell them. And now here was this ancient, trembly old lady. Where would she go on this freezing day while they looked at her house? Had she scrubbed the floors on arthritic knees for their appointment, when they probably wouldn’t even buy it?

“Hi!” called out Nick, while Alice shrank behind him, saying, “Shhh!” He pulled her out from behind him, and because she didn’t want to have a full-on wrestling match in public, she had no choice but to walk along beside him toward the old lady.

“We’re meeting the real estate agent here in a few moments,” explained Nick.

The old lady didn’t smile. “Your appointment isn’t until three.”

“Oh, no,” said Alice. There was something a bit familiar about the time three o’clock and she and Nick were always getting things like that wrong. (“God help you if you two ever have children,” Nick’s mother had said to them once.)

“Sorry about that,” said Nick. “We’ll go for a drive around the neighborhood. It looks beautiful.”

“You may as well come in now,” said the old lady. “I can do a better job of showing it to you than that smarmy weasel.”

Without waiting for an answer, she turned around and started shuffling up the path toward the house.