From a distance, the pyramid house almost looked like what it was always supposed to be: full of life.

In the film of moonlight creeping through the wisps of winter clouds, it was hard to make out the decay of the years, the century of misuse and neglect that had left it a hulking shadow of its glory days, back in the '20s when it had been built by a wealthy banker trying to outdo his neighbors.

I climbed through the window like a thief, just as I had the first night I came here, and it felt like all the years were whirling into one frozen moment. Was I fifteen again? Seventeen? Was I back in this room the night Adam first kissed me, the music box smashed against the wall, mermaids diving in infinite loops, oceans crashing all around us.

Looking about the deserted room, I could still picture it the way it had looked that night. The overelaborate bric-a-brac, the silken love seat, the gilded art that was trying a little too hard to prove to anyone who might be interested that the people who lived here were better than them.

I could smell the vodka pouring out of the bottle, acrid and harsh, dripping onto my bare feet. Adam's strong arms lifting me into the air.

But I shook my head. That's not why I was here.

I turned when I saw the headlights stream through the now-opened window, drowning me in a blast of yellow. My throat ran dry as I combed my fingers through my hair, removing the ponytail as I did so.

Then there was nothing to do but wait as he turned off the engine and climbed in to meet me.

Kieren bumped his head as he passed the window frame, probably a result of the extra two inches he'd grown since the last time we'd come here together—the night he told me the truth about the train accident, how Robbie had never really died.

He didn't look a thing like that young boy anymore, to be honest. He had grown out his hair, an obvious rebuttal of the close military crop ROTC had insisted upon. Now that he was almost twenty-one, he had finished the program, a fact which I knew from one of his very rare social media posts.

We hadn't talked in a couple months when I "hearted" that post, not since I'd said goodbye to him at the train station in August. He then hearted one of mine, which led to a handful of polite mid-afternoon text messages, followed by a couple of late-night ones that were a little less polite. You were the one that wanted this might have been the last one I sent him. That was a month ago.

He'd been asking me to meet up since I tagged my father's house as a location last week. But until tonight, I hadn't responded.

He smiled when he saw me waiting for him, and despite what I had promised myself, I smiled back.

I always smiled back when I saw Kieren.

"I win the bet then," he said.

"What bet is that?"

"I bet myself you wouldn't come."

"Yeah, what were my odds?"

"Fifty-fifty," he said, laughing either at himself for winning, or at me for caving. I wasn't sure which.

"Why here?" I asked. Kieren didn't know any of the details of what had happened between Adam and me in the past. I mean, he didn't know anything more than what Brady had told him, and even that was a lot of speculation.

So he had no way of knowing that this was the very room where Adam and I had first kissed, which was either a year or twenty years ago, depending on how you looked at it. So was it just a coincidence that he'd picked this location for our late-night rendezvous?

"I knew we could be alone here."

"We don't have to be alone anymore, Kieren. You could come to the house."

"Mm-hmm," he agreed.

"You could sit at the table. You could eat with us and pet the dog. You could—I mean, it could have been...normal." After all, we were living in the dimension that Kieren and I had always dreamed of creating—a dimension where Kieren had never dared Robbie to play chicken with an oncoming train, and Robbie had therefore never been hit; a dimension where there was no bad blood between our families.

Yet somehow, when I had dreamed of this reality for the four years that Robbie was lost to us, I had always imagined a different ending.

"You got a new dog?" he asked, laughing at the memory of the terrible advice he'd given me when we were little kids and my dog had died—the advice being that I could simply buy another one.

I only smiled and shook my head.

"How's school?" he asked.

"Fine. Hard."

"But you're acing it, right?"

"No. Not really," I admitted. MIT was insanely hard, was the truth of it. So hard that I'd cried myself to sleep the first two weeks, ready to admit defeat and beg for a transfer. It wasn't until I'd joined a good study group that I'd realized everybody felt that way at first. That everything was learnable, even mechanical engineering. That there was a way out of any hole you could dig.

"You look good," I said, and immediately regretted it.

"I miss you," he answered.

I turned and walked away, staring at the closed door that had been a washroom in the house when Adam and I had stayed here. It was now just a plain wooden door, termite-ridden around the edges, with darkness behind it.

"Did you hear me?"

"Yes," I answered, still not facing him. "I heard you."

He walked up behind me and put his arms around me, making me shudder against his strong chest.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Is this okay?"

I squeezed his hand and dipped out from under his arms, walking aimlessly through the abandoned room.

"You're mad at me," he said into the air. "I understand."

"I'm not mad."

"I left you in the world beneath the lake... with him. With Adam." He spit out the name like it left a bad taste in his mouth. "I should have brought you back with me."

"You're rewriting history," I said, shaking my head. "I chose to stay. That's how it went."

"And I shouldn't have let you make that choice. I knew I couldn't trust him."

"What are you talking about?"

"Brady told me, M. I know... I know what happened between you."

I could feel a hot blush invading my face. "Adam didn't do anything wrong."

"Are you kidding?" Kieren laughed with disgust. "You were seventeen."

"I was—" I stuttered, collecting my thoughts and my breath. "I was almost eighteen. Seven weeks, that's all."

"He was your teacher."

"For a week!" I said, repeating pathetically all the excuses I had been telling myself for over a year now—that what happened between me and Adam was okay. That it wasn't wrong. And it wasn't his fault.

"You don't know him, M."

I shook my head, a question forming in my scrunched eyebrows.

"Brady and I were freshmen when he was a senior. I remember him."

"Okay. So?"

"So he was... honestly, he was an asshole. He controlled everything and he made sure everybody knew it. He guarded the door to the boiler room and you couldn't enter without his permission. We were kids. We didn't even know what was down there, just that it was something only the cool kids were allowed to do. We thought it was a party or something."

"That doesn't sound so bad."

"You had to prove your loyalty to him before you could do anything—go to a party, sit at the right table. Brady was really obsessed with him when we first started school, wanted to be him."

"Sounds like he was just popular."

"No, M. We went to a party once where I saw him beat up this kid—this little freshman. Skinny little kid, a hundred and twenty pounds. Adam beat him to a pulp. When he was done, the poor kid was crying. Adam just stood up and laughed at him, then looked around the party and asked which one of us wanted to be next. And that wasn't even the worst of it."

I swallowed hard, steeling myself for more of this little speech. "What was the worst of it?"

"It was..." Kieren shrugged and took a deep breath, his shoulders scrunching up and then falling back down. "He would play these games... with girls. He called them flowers. He would laugh about how many he had... collected."

"Stop," I said, throwing my hair back into the ponytail just to have something to do with my hands.

"That was when Brady saw him for what he was: a bully and a jock. A wrestler who thought everything was just a match to be won."

I shook my head, but inside, my mind was tormenting me with a memory: Adam wrestling me into a half Nelson on the beach after we'd gone through the portal to Portland together. Bragging that he'd been All State for three years.

"He's changed," I said meekly. "That was high school. He's twenty-four now."

But Kieren just shook his head at me like he felt sorry for me. "He slept with his student and then skipped town, M. How much has he changed?"

But I couldn't hear anymore. "I'm going," I said, more for myself than for him.

"Wait, M, please."

I headed for the window, but I spun to face him before I could make it. "Is this why you asked me to come here?"

"What do you mean?"

"To make me feel bad? To tell me how naïve I was?"

"No, I'm not mad at you, M. Only at him."

"Well, don't be," I said.

We stood in silence for a moment, and he finally walked a bit closer.

"I don't need you to protect me," I continued. "I haven't even talked to him for a year."

"That's not why I wanted to meet you." Kieren stepped closer still, close enough that I now had to look up to meet his eye. He must have been about 6'3" by now, I realized. As tall as his dad. He worked his jaw in slow circles while he looked down at me, like he was chewing on the words he wanted to say to me next.

"Then why are we here?"

He didn't answer. Instead he stroked the back of his fingers against my cheek. "Don't you miss me?" he asked.

I closed my eyes and let myself enjoy the feel of his fingers for a moment. The truth is, it had been a long time since anyone had touched me for longer than a friendly hug. I had started to forget how good it could feel. "Sometimes," I answered, opening my eyes to meet his. "I miss what I thought we would be."

He leaned down and kissed me, and I just let him do it for a moment, studying the feel of his lips like a biologist observing a new lifeform. The way his strong nose brushed against mine, the way my mouth reacted to his. The way he smelled like oranges fresh from a tree.

"Come back to my place," he whispered. "We don't have to do anything, M. Just lie next to me, okay?"

I started to nod, but even as I did so, I knew it wasn't that simple. "When did you break up with Stephanie?" I asked, the words scratching against my tight throat.

He sighed, his face still so close to mine that I could feel the hot air escaping his nostrils and landing on my upper lip. He backed away a bit, his eyes on the floor.

"Kieren?"

"Look, it's complicated right now. Her mom's sick. We're running a marathon next month."

"Unbelievable," I muttered, turning to crawl out the window again. But I felt his long arms wrap around my waist and pull be back towards him. "Let me go, Kieren."

"Wait, please, M. Please," he begged, pulling my back into his chest and whispering over my shoulder. "I'll do it, okay? I promise. Next time I see her. I'll tell her about us."

"There's no 'us,' Kieren."

"There could be, though." He turned me around to face him. "Don't you want that? Don't you miss us, M?"

I sighed, trying to catch my breath and collect my thoughts. Yes, I had been incredibly lonely in Boston, of course. And I couldn't help but think, as I would lay in my bed alone poring over volumes of chemistry and calculus and the never-ending problem sets that seemed to take me twice as long as everyone else to solve, that I wanted nothing more than to feel a warm body next to me again.

But I had to be honest now. I didn't want to live with half truths and make-believe realities anymore. That wasn't the life I had chosen for myself, the life Adam had wanted me to find.

"I can't," I admitted. "I'm sorry, Kieren, but even if you break up with her, I can't."

"Why not?"

But I only shook my head. Saying it out loud was still too hard, too real.

"You're not waiting for him, are you?" Kieren asked, his voice trembling with an emotion that was either fear or anger.

I still couldn't speak, my eyes landing on the bare walls of the room. I could have sworn I heard a sound echoing against them—the mermaid music box, bleating out its last strained note.

"He'll break your heart, M," Kieren warned, but I could only laugh in response.

"Well, nobody breaks my heart like you do, Kieren," I answered. I turned away and crawled back out the window, leaving him there like a stone statue, permanently entombed in that ancient, forgotten house.

***

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