She could tell him that she orders food and groceries and other bits and bobs on a weekly basis. Sometimes more often. He could have guessed that if he’d had the slightest curiosity about how she managed to fill her home and her belly when she has no car and lives blocks away from the shopping centre.

Now she doesn’t even have her phone or wallet, thanks to him and his sister. Now she is hungry and scared and unsure what to do about it. Moving means pain without any certainty that satisfaction of her needs will come at the end of it. Moving means experiencing the rest of the disaster site. It’s too much to contemplate when she is still confronting the losses in here.

Like how always from her bed she has been able to reach out and touch with her fingertips the top that she had worn the first time Tony kissed her. It had been draped, always, from a Freedom Furniture, cow-spot-patterned swivel chair, the first big purchase she made after she started work at fifteen, and which had taken three months to pay for using lay-by, and which is also gone. Screaming Slut Red, Mum had called the colour of the shirt. Nic knew it was Revlon Fire & Ice Red. She couldn’t afford to buy the lipstick but she could pop in to the chemist on Norton Street and slick it on from the tester tube. Perfect match. The fabric was like layered cobwebs. Tony had commented on it, the delicate softness. He was sorry, after, when he noticed the back of it all fuzzed up from the friction of the brick wall she’d been pressed against for so long. So long kissing like that. Fully clothed and his hands mostly on the wall at her sides, her hands on his back, and it was almost too much. In bed alone that night she couldn’t shake the feeling he was inside her. Not the usual way men got inside women; not the temporary pushing in and out of a dick. This was cellular.

Of course the top was wrecked by that. Who wouldn’t be?

And long after she’d said goodbye to him for the final time, she could put her hand on the top and be twenty again. The cold brick against her kidneys, hot mouth against hers, hard-on making promises into her hip. The sound of him—the throaty tormented groan—when the security guard flashed a torch at them, told them to clear out. All of it right there in the fuzzy weave of that ten-dollar top.

Older, junkier stuff, Will had said.