I didn’t feel the need to ask her anything else. Breakfast was not the time. And then, well, I just never asked. I’ve thought about it, sure. Sometimes I wonder if she just liked the danger. I’ve read that it’s a thing, women falling for death row inmates, with some even having multiple wives. Or maybe someone in jail felt like a relief to her. A relationship that had literal boundaries, where she didn’t have to worry about the other stuff, the stuff that had torn us apart. Michael was incapable of having my faults, because he didn’t intersect with her life at all. I’ve gone through all the options, believe me. Maybe she’d been drinking the Cunningham Kool-Aid and, ironically, saw it as an act of loyalty. Maybe she believed him over me. Maybe he had the flint. When I was feeling spiteful, which I try not to be, I wondered if it was because they had something in common that I couldn’t match. This is called foreshadowing.

Michael was easier to figure out. I always thought he just wanted to take something from me.

Erin stepping out of the truck, while not a surprise, was indeed momentous. Because Michael had truly had no visitors in prison, and certainly no conjugal ones. This weekend was not only the first time I was seeing them together, it was the first time they were seeing each other. Their relationship was quite a mystery, and each of us had different ideas of what it actually meant. Call me fatalistic, or maybe just lazy, but I was happy to roll over: I considered them together, but always stopped short of calling them a couple. Lucy, with her tag-riddled wardrobe and emergency-beacon lipstick, clearly felt that it was something she could still weasel between. Everyone else seemed to vary on a scale between Disbelief and Acceptance, most hovering around Sceptical.

Looking back, I can’t have been as aloof as I’m writing myself here, because it did occur to me that they hadn’t spent the night together yet, with Erin only picking Michael up from the Cooma Correctional Centre, about a two-hour drive away, that morning. She would have stayed in the itchy-sheet motel I imagined her in last night. I don’t know why that’s important – who cares if they’d spent the night together or not – but I’ll admit it popped into my head. I mention that here because, I figure, if I had thought about such things, Lucy was probably clinging to them.

Erin made her way around the circle much more efficiently than Michael, partly because she had fewer people to shake hands with, as Lucy made a big show of tying up her shoelace. When she got to me, I extended my hand.

‘Nice things,’ I said. It’s a private joke we have; I was playing for a laugh.