“Let’s live together, Gray.”

His cheeks were red; I could feel mine were too but we didn’t move from the heater’s blast.

Then he said, “Got you a little something in Wales.”

After rummaging in his toilet bag, he gave me a yellow drawstring pouch. Inside was a circular pendant etched with a squiggly little sheep.

“That’s cute!” I regretted the c word the moment it came out.

“You like it?” he said. “There were others, more serious, with Celtic symbols and so on.”

I ran my thumb over the side of the disc that didn’t have the sheep. “You could always get it engraved.”

“With what?”

“My Meggie.”

Thinking I was making a joke, he burst out laughing. I pretended it was a joke too.

When the hilarity died down, I said, “My Meggie sounds stupid.”

“That’s not what I meant—”

“It’s got no gravitas.” It didn’t compare to My Sabine.

“Megan’s a beautiful name,” he said seriously. “Looked it up when I met you. It comes from Margaret, which means ‘pearl.’” I thought of how a pearl forms due to a foreign particle in an oyster. “Pearls have a natural, gentle beauty,” he added.

I tugged the cord to switch the heater off. “When shall I give notice on my room?”

“Why not move in when I get back?”

“In two weeks’ time?”

We stared at each other, hair half dry, eyes wide.

“If I leave now, I’ll catch my landlady before she goes to Ireland,” I said.

He pulled me to him; I smoothed his fringe.

“Much as I hate you to go, Mum . . .”

I wriggled away. “Don’t ever, ever call me that, Graham!”

He pecked my forehead. “You’re so easy to wind up.”

Part III

20

Often I am kept awake by guilt. Yet when I truly go back into the past my perspective shifts. As I write the story down, I can see that when I tried to do what I thought I should, my attempts were doomed. How do you treat others decently when you want to become someone else? How do you live well when you yearn to burn with all your spirit in moments of wildness or freedom or excess?

By the April day set for moving in with Graham, I’d been fully nocturnal for almost three months. I’d assumed it would come to feel natural. Instead, the idea of going home to sleep after my last shift began to seem unbearable. Pouring a nip of mezcal by the photocopier machine, Earl asked if I wanted a line of coke.

I thought back to the excitement of the dot I’d tried in Telford. Then I thought of Graham coming round that evening, of the cardboard boxes waiting to be packed.

“Meggie? Yes, no?”

The mezcal burned like a fuse down my throat. “Yes, please.”