She cannot blame herself. She blames the time of year. It is still dark in the early evenings, and a few hours ago, tempted by the dusky light, she fell to her knees in the pub car park. She blames the blue van. Enough to be kissing him goodbye, but behind the blue van obscured from anyone’s view, she was possessed by an urge to astonish him. In her action, these thoughts: she had planted desire in him and he was going home to his wife, a wife who might prove a willing receptacle for her husband’s desire, a desire that might rekindle something between them. Better to strip him of it, right there, than give it away. And how else might Jules haunt the locum through the handful of days that connect this goodbye to the next arranged hello? So she dropped to her knees.

What was most delicious? His gasp as she dropped. What delight to harvest that gasp, the collision of surprise and certainty.

She is deliberate at his belt, at his button, undoing him. Undoing him, she knows, in every way, for kissing one can excuse, but this, this— Yes, he will be haunted. Anticipation scrunches his fingers into her hair. Inevitable now. Barring the sudden reappearance of the blue van’s driver, she will push him gently over the cliff of his desire. And there is the added thrill; any moment, discovery. So unsafe, to do it like this, in the open air. Now, the unholy act. Yet it can’t be a sin if she doesn’t believe. And she doesn’t. God hasn’t been there for her. Unless. Unless you count this, this answer to her prayers. First touch of tongue on tip.

Jesus, woman, he says, and she thrills to hear that again in her head, its intimate brogue: Jesus, woman. She can still feel his hands in her hair. So responsive when Finlay is so—

Behind the blue van, Finlay didn’t enter her mind. Briefly, the thought came: I’m married. But only as a fact, something currently true. A simple thought, limping in with its baggage of wrongness, giving this act the frisson of an atheist’s sin rather than the dragging weight of betrayal. For hadn’t her husband betrayed her by running away in his mind and heart, and now so completely behind the bulletproof glass of this drug that he doesn’t even know he is gone? If Flora’s death had a message, was it not that, out of a clear blue sky, any of us could die at any moment? Live! was the call that Jules was now hearing above the quiet organization of cruet set and place mat. Live, live! From the flowers she jollied into pointless displays on the coffee table and the sideboard. You have asked for passion, and passion has come for you. Not in the shape of your husband, no, but live!