For years, I thought Quinn was dead. We had reconnected just months ago, after I tracked him down in Reykjavík. Seeing him again had broken some kind of psychic ice dam—thirty-plus years’ worth of emotions flooded me, everything I’d successfully frozen with alcohol and drugs.

And now Quinn was gone again. Three days earlier, he’d left the Canary Wharf flat where we’d briefly sought refuge, before my ill-fated excursion to Cornwall. Since then I’d had no message from him, no email, no phone call. Nothing but a two-word text message Quinn sent to someone else, after I’d last seen him:

rotherhithe darwin

Rotherhithe was in East London. Quinn had told me he knew a guy there who was supposed to help us get out of the country without running afoul of the authorities. But I’d never been to Rotherhithe, and I had no clue as to what “darwin” might mean.

I removed the old photo and stared at it, drew it to my face and inhaled, as though his scent might be imprinted there, some molecular code I could break that would help me find him. I smelled nothing but the hotel’s cheap carnation soap and the chemical tang of my own fear.

I slid the photo back into my wallet, finished dressing, and stood. I kept five hundred euros in my wallet. The rest I sealed in a ziplock bag that I shoved into the bottom of my right boot, along with my U.S. passport. I zipped up my leather jacket and headed downstairs.

Outside, the cold wind froze my damp hair into stiff spikes. As the Xanax I’d taken wore off, paranoia and anxiety filtered back into my nervous system. I walked fast, boot heels echoing along the sidewalk, turned onto a crowded street. My hand moved reflexively toward my chest, reaching for the camera that was no longer there. I fought waves of vertigo by focusing on the only other thing that had ever made me feel alive—my obsessive love for Quinn, an emotion as corrosive as battery acid.

At the corner, people swathed in overcoats and scarves waited for the light to change, mobiles glowing in their hands. I didn’t realize I was talking to myself until a woman stared at me, wide-eyed, then edged away. I cursed under my breath, elbowed my way to the curb to join the flow of commuters headed toward King’s Cross, and finally halted in front of a hair salon.

Pink LED lights blazed from behind a wall of glass. Inside, banks of mirrors created an infinity of blondes in chrome chairs, all waiting to be young again. I felt a twinge of envy that these women could let themselves believe in such a futile ritual, if only for an hour.