But there were times when, without any immediate drama, addicts just decided to stop, when a rare break in their clouds of denial illuminated how exhausting it was to maintain a habit, how gruelling it was to hurt themselves and others, over and over.

However, moments of clarity were usually preceded by months, maybe even years, of people begging them to stop.

Either way, it was to be seized upon—moments of clarity didn’t usually last long before the window closed up and it was once again Denial City.

Unexpectedly, I was flung back in time, to a morning long ago, in New York. I’d woken early and alone—and I felt different. Inexplicably calm.

Something had shifted and my soul was quiet.

I opened my bedroom curtains. Outside the window, the first hint of dawn hazed the horizon. As I watched, the sun peeped out and light began to spangle over the city. My window was wet—it must have been pelting down earlier. As the sun continued to rise, a ray caught on a raindrop on the glass and broke into the seven different colours of the rainbow, becoming smudged stripes of transparent colour on the wooden floor, right before me.

Seeing ‘signs’ had never been my thing but the same strange calm I’d woken up with was insisting that my personal rainbow was a very clear message: Be brave. Say goodbye. You’ll be fine.

Chalkie was still talking and hastily I tuned back in.

‘I was going to give NA another go,’ Chalkie said. ‘I’d done lots of stints there.’

But he’d never stayed long enough to do any healing—and there was so much for him to heal from. Born to a single mother, an addict, he wasn’t even three years old when she overdosed and died in their home. For seventy-two hours, he sat by her side, trying to wake her up. He’d even attempted to feed her, putting a saucepan on the hob and trying to open cans of soup by tearing off the paper labels.

His father had never been in his life so he lived with his grandmother. Sadly, she died when he was fifteen.

‘Then Skye tells me I’m on her health insurance.’

It was hard to know precisely what to call Skye’s relationship with Chalkie. She was the mother of his eight-year-old son, Tito. After Maarit died, Chalkie had asked Skye to adopt Vida. Now Vida lived with Skye full-time, but Chalkie came and went.

Skye was a social worker and a community activist. Chalkie had said—with warm admiration—she was ‘a working-class woman trapped in a middle-class body’.