Our first home with no roommates was a narrow apartment in Seattle. The radiator made a steady noise through the cold months. We blamed a ghost when a window opened on a chilly day or a book fell from a shelf. We ate noodles from the cartons on the floor because we hadn't found a couch yet.
Rhys fixed the little tables people had left at the curb until they looked new. Above our bed, he put up a shelf for the James Herriot books his father had read to him and his sisters. There was also a romance novel neither of us could remember buying. Rhys blamed the ghost. I was happy there, though I sometimes worried that things might change.
A few weeks before our old lease ended, Bianca gathered the four of us on Dane's soft couch. She was leaving Seattle—not just the apartment, but the city—to spend six months working on an organic farm in Belize. It was a WWOOF placement, she explained: room and board in return for work.
For a moment, none of us answered. We'd been together so long that we'd stopped imagining an end to it. Bianca said it was temporary, but tears ran down her face. We all knew our shared life was changing.
On the rug, we wrapped our arms around Bianca. The night before she left, Dane put together a slideshow of our favorite memories from the past three years. We cried through it. At the airport the next morning, we hugged her and promised we'd see her soon.
The four of us remaining tried to find another place big enough for everyone. We couldn't. Dane moved in with a friend from law school. Livia took over a vacant Seattle apartment owned by her family. Rhys and I scraped together enough for the little apartment above the bookstore where he worked.
That first night, I kept closing myself in the bathroom so I could cry. I missed Bianca so much it frightened me. I thought we might lose touch too, that my closest friends might become people I used to know.
When I finally came out, Rhys had called Dane and Livia. They were waiting with pizza and champagne.
“We had to christen the place,” Dane said.
Livia looked around. “I also want to see whether it's haunted.”
After that, the apartment began to feel like ours. We were glad to be there.
Dane and Livia came for dinner once a week. We called ourselves adults, but sometimes they slept on the couch and an air mattress. In the morning we'd get breakfast at a diner before heading to our different programs—or, for Rhys, down to the bookstore.
Being alone together never became dull. I paid attention to the small things Rhys shared with me. At night, one of us would say, “I love you so much.” Sometimes he got the last word; sometimes I did. On other nights we took turns refusing to hang up, laughing like teenagers.
Veterinary school grew more demanding. I began assisting my favorite professor with classes. We had sex less often, but we were always touching, always affectionate. Rhys's love felt dependable. I could become so anxious about breathing that I'd have to remind myself how to do it, but I never questioned how to love him.
Beside him in bed, my cold feet tucked between his warm legs, I sometimes heard the words in my thoughts: You belong here.
Saturday mornings meant coffee by the window and a crossword puzzle. Or the beginning of one. We made a habit of starting and abandoning them. I tried to finish one more clue than I had the week before. Rhys tried to derail us earlier.
“Eight across,” I said one morning, while he kissed my neck. “The Weakest Link.”
“Is that the show where they dropped people through a trapdoor when they lost?” he asked against my collarbone.
“I never watched it, but that's what I pictured as soon as I said the title. That can't have happened. It's too ridiculous.”
He shrugged and pulled me onto his lap. I kept my laptop and searched for the trapdoor. The first results were message boards full of people who remembered it as we did. Other pages made clear the show never had one.
“How can so many people remember the same thing wrong?” Rhys asked.
I explained the Mandela effect: large groups sharing a false memory. Some scientists described it as confabulation or fuzzy-trace memory, where people remember the gist but misremember details. Other people thought it could point to a multiverse.
He wound one of my curls around his finger. “I like that you explain things as if I'm going to follow.”
“I don't like that you pretend you're not smart.”
“I don't.”
“You do. Not knowing something doesn't make you stupid.”
“Then what does?” he asked, amused.
“Refusing to learn.”
“I'm willing.” He set my laptop aside and settled his hands on my thighs. “Tell me about the multiverse, and how it relates to that trapdoor.”
I told him that maybe consciousness moved between realities. Maybe we could live for years in one, then find ourselves in another where one small detail had changed. In some reality, contestants really had fallen through a trapdoor. If every possible event happened in some universe, there would be too many to count.
Rhys took my hand and kissed it. “In how many of them are we together?”
“More than either of us could count.”
His mouth turned up. “And you can count very high.”
“That's how they choose who gets into veterinary school. You stand before a committee of veterinarians and count as far as you can.”
“Do the good schools let you use your fingers?”
“No.”
He held my hand between both of his. “I'm glad I got into one. I feel sorry for every Rhys stuck with someone who thinks a horse is a kind of dog. They're missing out, Mara.”
“Then spare a thought for all the Maras dating men who think rhythm is a medical condition.”
“No,” he said, more quietly. “Every version of me chooses you. Even in the ones where you don't choose me.”
That wasn't how the multiverse worked. I didn't care. My Rhys meant it.
I was happier than I had ever been. I didn't yet know happiness could hurt as much as grief. I understood that later that night, when Rhys went to get Chinese food and returned soaked by the rain.
I was back at the crossword when the door clicked. I got up to help with the paper bags. As I set them on the counter, he took my wrist. He looked so serious that I thought something awful had happened.
“Marry me, Mara,” he said quietly.
“Yes.”
He froze and blinked, unsure he'd heard me. The kettle began to whistle. I touched his jaw. “Rhys. Yes.”
“Wait.”
“I don't want to wait.”
He reached into his jacket. “Give me a second. Don't move.” Then he ran to the bedroom. I stood shivering while drawers scraped open and shut. When he came back, he held out a blue velvet box, his hand unsteady.
Inside was an old white-gold ring with a square sapphire. “I thought it suited you,” he said. “It wasn't expensive, though. If you don't like it, we'll replace it when I can afford—”
My eyes filled. “You already had this?”
“I was waiting for the right moment.” He looked almost apologetic.
“This is it. Right now.”
“I couldn't keep waiting,” he said, still sounding a little regretful.
A small fear came to mind. “What if you get tired of me?”
“Mara,” he said, both tender and gently reproachful. “What if you get bored with me?”
I laughed, though I was close to crying. “Never.”
He held my face. His mouth was soft, his brow serious. “Then marry me.”
“Done.”
He kissed me. We reached for each other at once, eager and clumsy.
I had never imagined a proposal. If I had, it wouldn't have looked like that. I wouldn't have pictured us eating our usual Chinese takeout, then making love on the rickety IKEA couch, laughing whenever his head hit the wall and neither of us bothering to move to the bed.
It was better than anything I'd planned. Everything was better with him.
That summer, when we returned to Cape Lark, Livia, Dane, and Bianca—back from Belize—threw us an engagement party. Dane made a slideshow of our relationship, illustrated mostly with stick figures he'd drawn in a simple drawing program.
Life had been busy, and sometimes months passed without the five of us seeing each other. But when we met at the cottage, we fell back into our familiar routines.
We still felt close there. We changed, but kept making room for one another. Our relationship remained important to all of us, even when we were apart.
You belong here.