I glanced into the living room, where a tufted leather ottoman sat in front of an overstuffed sofa, surrounded by antique furniture, the kind you picked up at estate sales. Dark brown wooden beams stood out from the ceiling, and below me, the hardwood floors were banged up but beautiful. Her home had plenty to be jealous of but little to hate. It was imperfect, far from museumlike, with dust on the baseboards and clutter on every surface: junk mail, water glasses marked with lipstick, shoes tossed into the corner.

And books, books everywhere. Stacked in the hallway, lining the inset shelves in the living room. Art and philosophy (Warhol, Kant); high and low (White Teeth, Twilight); Ta-Nehisi Coates on top of Daphne du Maurier. Books always made me feel safe. Suddenly, I wished I’d taken more from my childhood, could read myself the ones my mother had once read to me.

‘John,’ Vera yelled up the stairs. ‘Lucy is here!’ Not ‘Lucy, the neighbor.’ Or ‘Lucy, the woman I told you about.’ Just Lucy. She didn’t wait for anyone to bound down the stairs, but led me through the living room, where I detected the faint scent of weed, and into the kitchen in back. Unlike the rest of the house, it was small and cramped, as if whoever had designed the formal rooms in front had forgotten that people actually had to, you know, cook and tacked it on haphazardly. White tiles were everywhere – on the floor, on the backsplash – caked with grout and pasta sauce, one of them cracked all the way across, and a small kitchen island was piled on one side with even more junk mail and on the other with containers of spices and an empty tub of ricotta.

‘I brought this over,’ I said, retrieving Davis’s good whiskey from my oversize purse and handing it to her. ‘It’s already opened, which I know is a little gauche, but it’s good – promise.’

Vera’s eyes lit up. ‘Oh, screw gauche,’ she said. ‘I love gauche, in fact. This is wonderful. Now I’m going to be gauche myself and insist we drink it right now.’ Without waiting for my reaction, she pushed the junk mail aside and set the bottle on the island, pulled three glasses out of a weathered cabinet, and grabbed ice from the freezer with her bare hands. When she shut the fridge, I saw a whiteboard on the front, with a to-do list so different from mine, it was nuts. Only one item: Rachel.

Vera pushed a glass at me, poured tall, and I took it gratefully; I tried not to sip too fast.

‘John!’ she called again. Footsteps thudded from down the hall.

He walked in, and I coughed, choking as a bit of whiskey slipped down the wrong pipe.