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what?”
    And then—
    I don’t answer.
    “And then we wait for you to get better,” says Louis. “And while we wait, there is the danger of the police or Meryl’s family finding out where she was last
seen.”
    “She’s probably been missing since early this year,” I say, “and yet her body’s still here.”
    Just a few days ago, a young woman approached the gate and asked if Meryl was in this house.
    Louis doesn’t bring it up. “All right. You get better. We leave this city, go someplace else. With bodies and identities that may be guilty of a crime.”
    I don’t say anything. Then: “Let’s take the body out of the freezer and bury it.”
    “At the risk of our neighbors seeing something?”
    “What neighbors?” I scoff.
    “You’re right. It’s a quiet street. But are you a hundred percent sure there’s no nocturnal teenager looking out of his window into our backyard right now?”
    “There’s the spell,” I say.
    Louis falls silent for a moment. “Well,” he says. He stands up, begins to pace. I wish I could do the same. “It’s flimsy. It won’t hold up for long. And it’s
only meant to keep uninvited people out, not make the house invisible.”
    “We find another body to switch to,” I say.
    He stops walking. “I told you,” he says. “We can’t do this again. You saw what happened to—”
    I know. I know. But—
    “We were able to make the switch perfectly,” I say, and almost instantly feel the throb of pain in my right leg, my ruined knee, the throb increasing in magnitude, crushing like a
vise.
    Louis runs out and comes back with opioids and a glass of water.
    “What’s the endgame here, Louis?” I ask, minutes later. I imagine myself at sea, I imagine the pain as a series of waves, ebbing, leaving.
    “I’m sorry,” Louis says, and I am instantly angry at him for ignoring my question. “I didn’t mean to fight. I’ll bury the planner in the garden tomorrow. That
should be easy enough. My first thought, really, was to move the body, but I can’t—” he pauses “—I don’t want to touch her.”
    The anger dissipates. I think of him, the real him, in our previous life, five years older and brighter, kinder, more compassionate, than my own father. I remember the forbidden books he
smuggled into the estate so I could have something more worthwhile to read, some world more worthwhile to visit. Something to aspire to. His stories and the books he brought created something that
wasn’t there before—a want—and I still can’t decide if this first act of rebellion against our fathers is a good thing or a bad thing. If it was worth it.
    “I hope they abandon the search soon,” Louis is saying now. “I checked online, there is a small article about a missing student named Meryl Solomon. There is an ongoing search.
There are social network groups talking about her and her last whereabouts but they all seem stumped.”
    Look at what has happened to us, I think.
    “What’s the endgame here?” I ask again.
    He doesn’t reply.
    “You plan to stay in these bodies until we die?” I say.
    “Do you have a better plan?”
    I am so surprised by his rage that I am rendered mute.
    “If I could give you my right leg I would,” Louis says, “but I can’t. These are the cards we were dealt.”
    I give myself a pep talk every morning: you are injured but you are away from the estate, you are with your cousin who is kind enough to take care of you, you have a chance to live a new life.
You should be grateful, you should be grateful, you should be grateful.
    But I have listened to the doctors, I have read the literature. I should be able to use crutches along with the brace to move about in the first six weeks post-surgery (“early
weight-bearing is encouraged”) but the pain is incredible. Even my left leg can’t seem to carry me. Sometimes I can’t feel anything below my right knee. I know—I am
sure—that there will be more surgeries down the road, years