The first time she noticed she was wanted and that she wanted someone else was when she was twenty. Tony. He was a mess of a man—always drunk or high or both, always broke. Often in debt to people who thought nothing of pulling a knife to settle an argument or smashing someone in the back of the head with a rock over a perceived disrespectful look. The latter happened to a friend of Tony’s. The man, whose name she couldn’t remember, lived but was, as they said, not all there after that. The former, well, that actually happened to Tony—he was fine, the knife nicked his breastbone, gave him a proper scar—but it also happened to another man fifteen years earlier and that man died. In that case, the knifeman wasn’t someone Tony owed money to but her own daddy. The two cases had nothing to do with each other except in the murk of Nic’s guts whenever Tony begged money off her to pay someone who might otherwise get nasty.

The begging didn’t bother her so much. She was richer than she ever imagined being, having a job at the local discount department store which paid just okay normally but time and a half on nights and weekends, which was mostly when she worked back then. She was living with Mum still, paying a bit of rent and helping with the bills, but nothing like she would have to pay if she moved out—and why would she when Michelle was gone, already moved in with Joe, and Mum kept to her own self and it was an easy stroll to work and with Tony to pick her up after late shifts.

So if Tony needed fifty bucks here and a hundred there it wasn’t a big deal. But she knew already at twenty that people don’t change, not really. If anything, they become more and more themselves. Eventually he would run up a debt that she couldn’t pay and the knife would not nick his breastbone but sink deep into his heart or guts. Or he would, as he sometimes threatened when he was drunk and trying to prove how big his balls were (as though she didn’t know their exact size, having rolled them in her mouth with great care), use a knife of his own to put a stop to the hounding.