This thing had been going on for months, but never in her house. It was always at his place, or in his truck or her car down a dirt road. Once or twice, a motel.

She put her hand on his chest and pushed him away, the other hand on his belt. Anouk’s dirty breakfast bowl was still on the table.

‘You want to go for a drive?’ he said, his eyes already heavy, drugged. ‘I’ll take you anywhere you want.’

She stepped away and straightened her top, tightened the elastic around her hair. ‘I knew this was going to happen.’

‘Isn’t that why I’m here?’

‘You’re here to help me with the walls.’

He stared at her for a bit, as if hoping this were a joke. ‘You sure?’

She reached for the bag of sandpaper and pulled it out and found that Red had bought plenty. Three different grains.

‘I’m going for a swim first,’ Jody said, and let the screen door bang on his way out.

This wasn’t love. Far from it.

The sanding was done, the walls stripped, and the holes filled and smoothed over. And the dust, fine and powdery, was everywhere. Nora and Jody were both coated with it and there was still all the cleaning to do, but he came up behind her and slid his hand into her shorts. She dropped the rag she was holding and his tongue groped her ear (she never liked this much: hot and wet, the breathing cartoonishly loud) and she let him take her weight. Closed her eyes and got what she wanted, the only thing she wanted out of this: the illusion that she could have been anywhere, that her days were not inevitable. The newly sanded walls fell away and she floated up, over the river, over the choking trees, over the purple fields, the yellow fields. She never knew where she would land but this time it was the apartment she’d lived in, in Toronto, before Red. It was in a building just off the boardwalk along Lake Ontario. The building, gone now, was listing to the east, sinking into the soft ground. It was so dilapidated that to walk down the corridor was to stumble like a drunk. It was a shitty apartment. Dark. Small windows. Always someone else’s television. Always someone else’s dog. The odours of other people’s lives.

Jody pulled her hand around to him and she obliged. Her knees felt weak. But only because this was awkward, standing up like this leaning against him.

There was too much space here. She missed the comfort of close walls, or the incoherent mumble of a neighbour’s radio. Her sister Mel lived near by, and they used to talk, all the time. Drinking coffee in her shitty apartment or walking out on the pier in winter, brown hunks of ice hanging off its edge like a beard. She didn’t remember what they spoke about but if it had been fear, she wouldn’t have known about fear then. Likewise for love. She wouldn’t have known about love. She saw now that the two were inextricable.