It is all touch, after all. With Queenie and Misrak it had been uncomplicated. We had been so obsessed with boys, trying to understand our bodies as weapons, not as playgrounds. But still, we would lie beside each other, the ease of tangled feet. And none of this had anything to do with the jiggle in my cunt while riding behind the neighbour boy Agostino Bernardi on his motorbike in Vicenza, or what I felt resting my knee against Blake’s that first time. Certainly nothing to do with clambering on top of Vik in the dark of a dead-end street. All that had made me feel was that there was a ladder inside me – climbing, conquering, descending, dwindling. I tried explaining it to Blake once, how sometimes what you wanted was not a ladder but a lake. Something that spread all around you.

‘I think it has to do with birthing,’ he said. ‘Only women are capable of doing it. Perhaps what you really want is a baby?’

Always, we came back to this.

We had moved from an apartment in Charlotte to a house and then a bigger house in the space of seven years. Blake’s job paid for everything. He was frequently away on projects in counties across the state, working with farmers and their problems with soil contamination or fitting out waste-water management units in hotels and factories. On weekends, as if he hadn’t tired of mud, he’d fuss with the pergola and the deck, coaxing wisteria, taming clematis.

I took ikebana and philosophy courses at night, thinking I’d find a way, but nothing stuck. When Blake was gone I walked through the rooms in the house trying to imagine what it would be like filled with the noise of children. I fought for air even though there was so much space.

I began working out. I’d always despised gymnasiums. All those people conscientiously sweating together on machines, gaping through wide, attractive windows. Silverbacks in tank tops pumping iron. Women in flocks of three clutching at water bottles. I was thirty-two, and what I was hoping for was an awakening in my body.

I quickly grew to love them – the new ridges in my thighs and shoulders, hard tongues of muscle that could stiffen and relax. My heart felt closer to me than it had in years. I listened to trashy music on earphones as I moved on the treadmill, legs pounding as though they had hearts of their own. I felt powerful. I began to watch people watch me. In the changing room I caught flashes of other women’s naked stomachs, their dimpled thighs, the way they stepped leisurely into panties. The smells of deodorant and perfume were like infinity to me. I watched how dexterously frizz could be rolled out of hair with blow-dryers, so many pairs of arms furling and unfurling.

‘It’s shitty that we have to die,’ I said to Blake one night.