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Alexis opened the front door before I knocked. She was still in her scrubs, and she’d been crying. She stepped aside without saying a word to let me in, and I peered around quietly.

It was cavernous. And cold.

Everything was gray, like a filter was over it. The floors were white marble and the ceilings were vaulted, which only made the room seem more hollow. Like an ice cave.

She sniffed. “This is where I live.” She said it like an apology.

She led me through the house silently. Our footsteps echoed as we passed an enormous living room with white sofas, a shiny black piano, muted Oriental rugs, expensive-looking paintings. There was a dining room with a table that could seat twenty and a huge crystal chandelier over it. Then a humongous kitchen, one she hadn’t even known how to use until a few months ago.

I remembered her calling me when the power was out and her telling me the stove was gas. I scoffed looking at it now. It was a huge Viking range, nine burners, double oven, a wall-mounted pot filler over it. Here I was thinking I was talking to her about a regular old oven and it was this. It was almost comical.

There were more bathrooms than I could count. Hallways bigger than my loft with marble tables that had fresh flower arrangements the size of my dog sitting on them. A library with twenty-foot-tall bookshelves and a sliding ladder. At one point we saw a maid. She looked at me like I confused her, like maybe I was a new employee or something.

We moved through an office that overlooked a lake out back. There were awards and diplomas hanging. Hers and Neil’s. So many between them, they covered half a wall. PhDs: Yale for him, Stanford and Berkeley for her. There was a pool with a waterfall through the French doors, and I remembered all the times Alexis sat out there to talk to me. Me sitting in my dusty, shitty garage where I made her sleep, and her in this place, like a palace.

I felt almost catfished. It was ridiculous, but I did. Like she hadn’t been fully honest about who she was. But in truth, she had been honest. It was just that my imagination had failed me.

You fill in blanks. You take the information given to you and you make assumptions that complete the picture in your mind. I realized now that all my pictures had been drastically wrong. She was a hundred times higher up than I’d ever allowed myself to imagine. I couldn’t even grasp this kind of wealth.

When I’d seen her at the hospital earlier, even that had been a small reality check. I knew she was a doctor. I’d seen her treat patients. But it was different seeing her actually there, wearing scrubs and standing in an ER, a doctor’s name tag hanging off her pocket. I wasn’t fully prepared for that, even with all the lead-up to it, and I definitely wasn’t prepared for this.

I got now why she didn’t know how to clean or cook—I really got it. Because someone who could live like this had people running their lives for them. People like me.

Now I understood even more what I must have looked like to her friends and family, why they reacted the way they did. Especially now that I’d seen her ex. I was everything opposite of that guy. How did someone like me fit? I was uncomfortable even being in this house. I couldn’t imagine being with her here, cooking in that kitchen, even sitting in the living room. I felt the way the truck looked parked in the driveway. Out of place and like I didn’t belong.

She took me up a grand, twisting staircase that made the one at home look small in comparison. Three more guest rooms, more bathrooms, and finally a room with a dead bolt on the door. She unlocked it and stood back while I went inside.

It was the master bedroom.

I looked around, not saying a word. It was bright and warm, like it wasn’t a part of the rest of the house. A king-size bed sat in the middle of it. There were plush chairs and a rose-colored bedspread. A framed photograph of a girl in a field of poppies. There was a small fridge pushed against the wall with a microwave on top and a Keurig. It was the only room that felt like the woman she was in Wakan.

It was the only place where I finally saw us.

She had knickknacks on her nightstand. Small treasures. Little things I’d made her, a raccoon I’d carved from wood, just something funny I’d whittled out in an hour. There was a jar of the strawberry jam we’d made a few weeks ago, one of my hoodies tossed over a chair.

The heart-shaped rock.

Souvenirs.

This was why she wanted me to see her house. It was worth a million words of explanation.

For the first time she came full circle for me. I finally saw all of her. She came together like a puzzle that had been missing pieces. It was like she was two different people.

And then I realized she was.

Who she was with me was who she was on vacation. Who she was in Wakan wasn’t real life.

This was her real life.

And I knew before she even said anything that she wasn’t going to ask me to be a part of it.

She sniffed, and she looked like she might start crying again. “My dad wants me to get back with Neil,” she said. “He loves him and won’t accept our breakup. Neil’s forcing me to live with him because he wants the house in the separation—and he wants me back,” she added. “I can’t leave my job to be with you because if I do I’ll break a hundred-and-twenty-five-year family legacy. And if you come here to be with me, you’ll lose your house and my parents won’t ever speak to me again.”

She pressed her lips together like she was trying not to sob. “So that’s where we are. I’m sorry, Daniel…”

I felt my throat get tight, and I forced myself to say the words I already knew the answer to. “Are you breaking up with me?” I asked, my voice thick.

She looked anguished. “We knew it wasn’t going to last. We got more time than I thought we would, and I’m so grateful for it.” Her voice cracked on the last word.