But Connor didn’t seem to mind. “Is it always this nice in Fielding?” he said.

“Just be grateful it isn’t snowing.” She crossed her arms and her Windbreaker squeaked, a tiny farting noise. She quickly uncrossed them. “Last winter, Toby got out and nearly froze in a drift. Thank God his ears are so long. Otherwise I would never have found him.”

Connor laughed. The noise was loud and echoed. Most of the furniture wasn’t set up yet, and all the rugs were bundled in a corner. But Dea could imagine, already, the shape that the living room would take: the comfy leather couches, worn in from years of Super Bowl viewing parties and Sunday afternoon veg-out sessions; the big flat screen TV and the just-shabby-enough throw pillows and the family photos, clustered across every available surface, sprouting like weeds on side tables, mantels, bookshelves.

Dea reached into her bag and took out Connor’s iPhone. She couldn’t look at him. “Here. I must have grabbed it accidentally.”

“Hey, thanks. I was about to put out an Amber Alert.” Connor was wearing track pants and a soft-looking T-shirt. It occurred to Dea that he was wearing his sleep clothes. That she had gotten him out of bed. Then she thought about being with him in bed and immediately had to think of something else. Ice cubes. Poison ivy. Heat rash. “Listen, about yesterday . . .”

“That’s why I came by, actually,” she jumped in. “I wanted to apologize.”

“You don’t have to,” he said.

She already had, of course. But she plunged on, “I do. I’m sorry. I freaked out.” Then, without planning the words before she was speaking them: “My dad loved rummage sales. We used to go, when I was little.” The lie was immediate and convincing. She latched onto it, coaxed it into life. “I guess sometimes I just get . . . overwhelmed.”

“What happened to him?” Connor asked.

“He died.” She had a bad taste in her mouth, like the lie had soured there. But she dismissed the feeling of guilt. Her dad probably was dead. Might as well be, whoever he was.

“I’m sorry,” Connor said quietly. He reached out and touched her arm. “My mom died, too.” The words came out kind of strangled, as if he wasn’t used to saying them. Dea thought of the pretty woman in his dream, stringing lights on a Christmas tree.

The idea flashed: now they had something in common. The second she thought it, she felt ten times worse. What kind of fucking person was she?

“I’m sorry,” she echoed.

“Thanks.” For a second, Connor just stood there, awkwardly fiddling with his phone, as though verifying it still worked. He looked so cute in his track pants, and Dea couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wasn’t stupid. But then Connor looked up. “So . . . you want a tour or something?”

“Are you trying to pay me back for yesterday?” she asked.

He smiled, and his face did that puzzle-piece-rearranging thing again. Click, click, click, and it was perfect. “I can’t promise you Ohio’s largest corn maze,” he said. “But I can promise you an excellent view of a whole lot of boxes.”

“Sounds great,” she said, happy for the excuse just to stay a little longer.

They moved through the downstairs, which was big, and seemed even bigger with hardly any furniture. Everywhere, Dea saw signs of a normal family growing out of the soft, mulch-y boxes, the way mushrooms sprout from dirt. And the more she saw, the more she wished that what she’d said about her dad was true; and the more she wished it, the more she could imagine it. Her dad. A lawyer. No—a doctor. A cardiologist. Flattened by a heart attack one day. Ironic. He shouldn’t have worked so hard, but he just loved saving other people.

Connor took her from room to room, showing off random features of his home, acting as if Dea were an interested buyer and he was a broker, and making up ridiculous terms like “scrolled spigoting” and “twentieth-century post-modernist classicism” to describe the sink and the toilet. In the kitchen, he actually showed off the inside of the refrigerator, which so far contained nothing but milk, several Chinese takeout containers, and three family-size bottles of ketchup.

“What’s with the ketchup?” Dea asked. The house phone had started ringing—a shrill, startling sound—but Connor ignored it. “You preparing for Armageddon?”

“You can never have too much ketchup,” he said. “I think that’s written in the Constitution somewhere.”

“Hmmm. I don’t remember that part from history class.”

The phone stopped ringing, but a second later the voice mail kicked on, making Dea jump.

“Hello,” a woman’s voice said; amplified by the speakers, her voice seemed to be coming from several places at once, “this is Kate Patinsky again, from the graduate school of criminal justice at Howard Jay University. I’ve tried several times to reach—”

Connor practically leapt across the room and punched off the answering machine. “Courtesy call,” he said breathlessly. “I keep telling my dad and stepmom we should just chuck the phone out the window.”

“Where are your parents?” she thought to ask. They left the kitchen and started up the stairs to the second floor.

“Church,” Connor said. Even though he was walking ahead of her, Dea could sense the eye roll in his shoulders.

“You got off the hook?” she said. Everyone in Fielding went to church, at least on Christmas and Easter. Everyone but Dea and her mom.

“I don’t believe in God.” Connor had reached the top of the stairs and he turned around to look at her. His face was in shadow, but she could tell he wasn’t smiling.

“You believe in ghosts, but you don’t believe in God?” She tried to make a joke out of it. She didn’t know whether she believed in God—but the way he looked, with his face carved out of darkness, and his hand gripping the banister, made her suddenly uneasy. “‘There are more things on heaven and earth’ . . . ?”

“I don’t believe in heaven, either.” For a second, his voice sounded alien. Then he reached out and turned on a light, and his face reappeared. Now he was smiling. “Plus, I like sleeping in on Sundays.”

She thought of Connor asleep, his legs tangled in navy blue flannel sheets—and a quiet snow falling in his dreams.

“Welcome to Casa Connor,” he said, pushing open a door at the end of the hall. She followed him into his bedroom: a small, pretty room with three big windows that would let in lots of light, when there was any light to let in. The rain drummed against the glass like thousands of tiny feet making a run for something better.

There were boxes heaped on the ground. One of them was filled with old sports trophies and swim team medals, another with video games and wires and a few water-warped books. Clothes were piled on the desk—mostly balled-up sweatshirts and jeans, from what she could tell—and the room smelled like new paint and pine trees. Dea nearly burst out laughing when she saw navy blue flannel sheets. Maybe, somehow, walking his dreams had brought them closer. Maybe she understood him, at least a little bit.

The idea came to her, immediate and overpowering: she needed to walk his dreams again. Tonight. As soon as possible.

But she had already disturbed the course of his dream—touched something, made something. Walking a person’s dream more than once was majorly against the rules.

Who cares? a little voice in her head spoke up. Why does it matter?

“What’s so funny?” Connor flopped down onto the bed, leaning back on his elbows. Dea suddenly realized that she was alone with a boy—a cute boy—in his bedroom. She had no idea whether this was a thing—whether he’d asked her up here for a reason. What would Gollum tell her to do? Probably to go kamikaze-style on him, hurl herself into his arms and try to kiss the cute off his face.

Instead, she stood, stiff-backed and awkward, by the door.