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Inside, the house is silent and chilly. “Stay here,” I tell Zach. I step into the living room and reset the thermostat. The boiler makes its gargling noise down in the basement. The house will be warm soon. I head down the hall to my bedroom, where I inspect Mama’s beaded dress (none the worse for my adventures) and put on one of her big warm shawls over it. When I reappear in the kitchen, Zach is perusing Beck’s collection of tetsubin, Japanese iron teapots.

“Do you want anything to drink?” I ask Zach.

“What do you have?”

“I don’t know.” I look in the fridge and then in the pantry. “Gin. Some IPA. Whiskey.”

“How about tea? I could use something hot.”

I make tea using my favorite of Beck’s teapots, the greenish nubbly one. Mama and Beck have left me some plum cake, so I cut us each a piece. I’m not usually the hostess here, and it feels funny to move around our kitchen serving someone. I can’t remember the last time I was alone in this house or had a friend visit without Mama here to fuss over us.

“Is this where you grew up?” Zach wants to know.

“Yeah. My parents bought it before I was born. That garage-like building out in the backyard is my mother’s papermaking studio. That’s my dad’s desk, by the window, and his books. He used to sit there and read, and she would be in the studio making art. If I was in here with my dad, I would read my own books, or he would read to me, and if I was with my mom in the studio I would make drawings, or help her. I always felt safe when I could see both of them at the same time.”

It’s soothing to sit here with Zach and drink tea. The house starts to feel warmer, but we continue to sit, chatting idly, cupping our hands around our teacups. I’d like to sit here with him forever. He’s attractively disheveled from our earlier adventures. I watch his eager face as he looks around, noticing things, and then he notices something I’d rather he didn’t.

“Why do you have so many locks?” Zach asks. He’s referring to the steel security door to the basement. We have a touch pad and several dead bolts on it. Zach can’t see it, but there are cameras trained on both sides of the door.

Can I trust my future self, when she urges me to trust Zach? I’ve got to, I guess, a little bit. “It’s kind of a family secret. There’s a lot of computer equipment down there. It belongs to Beck, and we keep it locked up when nobody’s home.”

Zach smiles. “Are you afraid it’s going to escape?”

He’s joking, but I’m serious. “Yes.”

He waits for me to go on, but I outwait him. “Thanks for trusting me, then,” he says, pleasantly ironic. “With a family secret.” He studies my face, takes my hands in his. “Alba, has your older self told you anything about me?”

“No. I haven’t asked. Though I did google you.”

“And?”

“Crickets.”

Zach looks away.

“You’ve changed your name,” I say. “Was any of the other stuff you told me true?”

“Yes,” he replies. “Most of it. Enough that if you wanted to, you could figure out who I used to be.”

“Why did you need to disappear?”

He takes a deep breath. I wait. He says, “It’s not what you’re worrying about—I’m not a fugitive. I went no-contact with my family a few years ago, but my parents kept trying to get at me, and finally I just gave up my identity, dropped out of school, started waiting tables—I changed everything. But it’s been harder to build up a life from nothing than I thought it would be.” He sighs. “I saw your older self yesterday. I got the feeling, talking with her, that you and I have—a future. Some kind of future. She didn’t exactly say, but she hinted very heavily—”

“She does that to me. It mostly gives me the wrong idea about things and I feel like an idiot.”

Zach says, “Yeah. It’s not that I don’t want—I just, I mean, she made it seem as though our—relationship—is a prefabricated house, ready for us to move into without much effort, and if I know anything about marriage, it’s that it’s messy and crazy, like a gut rehab. So I’m very confused.”

“Marriage? Did I actually say we were married?” Suddenly I feel slightly nauseous. I disengage my hands from Zach’s and place them flat on the cool surface of the kitchen table. I close my eyes, breathe and try not to think. When I open my eyes, Zach is watching me. He looks worried. “Sorry,” I tell him, “I just felt a little woozy.”

“I thought you were about to faint,” Zach says.

“I thought I was about to time travel,” I say, “but I’m okay now. Let’s go sit on the sofa.” We relocate to the living room. I turn on two lamps. Zach sits down carefully in Beck’s place on our sofa, and I sit next to him in my mother’s place. I wonder how they’re spending their New Year’s Eve, and realize that they are almost certainly asleep by now, since they’re an hour ahead of us. “What time is it?” I ask.

Zach consults his phone. “A little after two. C’mere.” He stretches his arms above his head and leans back into the sofa cushions; I curl up against him and rest my head on his shoulder and he wraps his arm around me. Fireworks pop, far away.

Eventually Zach says, “You didn’t say anything about marriage. Don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t objecting,” I assure him. “I just like to have options. I don’t like to know my future unless it’s necessary.”