“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened there.” I knelt down by the chaise longue and cupped her cheek in my hand—the bones beneath her skin were reassuringly solid. I kissed her, but after a moment she pushed my face away.

“Has something happened?”

“I was involved in an incident,” I said. “Somebody died.”

“Oh,” she said and put her arms around me. “What happened?”

“I’m not really supposed to talk about it,” I said and slipped my hand down her hip in the hope that it would distract her.

“But if you could talk about it,” she said. “You’d talk about it with me?”

“Sure,” I said. But I was lying.

“Poor thing,” she said and kissed me.

I found that if I held her close I didn’t have any more nightmares. At one point in the proceedings the chaise longue shifted alarmingly and I heard the crack of splintering wood. We hurriedly separated just long enough for me to put a few cushions on the floor and throw a blanket over them. She pushed me onto my back, straddled me, and it all got wonderfully strenuous and sweaty until finally she flopped down on me as boneless and as slippery as a fish.

“It’s peculiar,” she said after she’d caught her breath. “I used to always want to go out. But with you I just want to stay in all the time.”

She rolled off and slid her hand down my stomach to cup my balls. “Do you know what I’d really like now?” she asked.

“There’s cakes in the fridge,” I said.

I was hard again and slipped her hand up to grab hold.

“You’re a terrible man,” she said. She gave me a quick shake as if judging my readiness and then, pausing briefly to kiss it on the head, got up and made her way to the fridge. “That Jap food’s all very well,” she said. “But I don’t think they know how to make a decent patisserie.”

Later, exhausted but unable to sleep, I lay with her under the skylight and watched the rain rippling down the panes. Simone again slept with her head on my shoulder, a leg slung possessively across my thighs, and her arm draped around my waist—as if making sure I couldn’t slink away in the middle of the night.

I’m not a player, but I’d never had a girlfriend who’d lasted more than three months. Leslie said that my exes knew that past a certain point I’d lost interest and that’s why they always packed me in first. That’s not the way I remember it, but Leslie swore she could have constructed a calendar based on my love life. A cyclical one, she said, like the Maya—counting down to disaster. Leslie could be surprisingly erudite sometimes.