He shrugged. ‘No more than I should be.’ His eyes turned down at the corners, his crow’s-feet catching the light. Dusty hopped into his lap, and John scratched at his back, just above his tail. He knew exactly where Dusty liked to be scratched, just as I did. ‘Maybe I’m just sad. I love it here,’ he went on. ‘I feel like it’s home. I don’t want to leave, but part of me is happy that I won’t be looked at like this anymore, like I’m some sort of monster.’

I knew in my heart that he wasn’t. He was only a man too naive to understand how certain things look. I didn’t for a second believe that anything had happened between him and a sixteen-year-old, but at the same time, staying here and proclaiming his innocence wasn’t possible, not after all the ways they’d been threatened. Maybe in some strange way, all of this was for the best, his death a relief, even, for the girl. After all, rumors were circling her, too.

‘You’re not a monster,’ I said finally, letting myself look at him, really take him in. His worn sweater, jeans marred from wearing them while he worked. The way the skin roughened around his knuckles and the beds of his nails were never quite fully clean from paint. He was a man’s man, wearing every one of his forty years with pride. He was old enough to be a sixteen-year-old’s father – it wasn’t possible.

I cleared my throat. ‘Do you think you’ll miss anything – or have any regrets – being dead, I mean?’

A smile crept up the side of his mouth. ‘I’m sure I’ll have some,’ he said, and with the wildness of the whiskey already pumping through my veins, I let myself pretend he was talking about me, that he regretted not having a chance with me.

Another intrusive thought, crazy and wrong – of reaching for him, his roughened hands, his broad shoulders, instead of my whiskey.

The first glass drained easily, almost as if it were leaking, water through a sieve.

The second glass went quickly, too, both of us drinking too fast, painfully aware that this might be the last night of semi-normalcy for a very long time. For him – perhaps forever.

‘What do you miss most about the city?’ John asked, leaning forward to pour us a third glass.

Or was it technically a fourth?

I gazed into my drink, remembering. ‘The way you passed so many people in a day, but you could still stay completely anonymous. You?’

‘The smell of bread on our old block. I used to go out to get coffee and cigarettes, and all you could smell was yeast.’

‘You smoked?’ I asked. ‘Even, you know, with your parents’ cancer and all?’