She asked him why it was okay for her son and her ex-husband to stay in a hotel, but in theory she needed something more secure? Vincent said if this dragged out longer than a few days, they’d need a better arrangement, but for now, she was the one with the primary risk. That got him onto the topic of Bluesmoke’s safe houses—one in Westwood, and an apartment in Culver City. They had them specially set up for VIPs, apparently. She asked him what that meant—being VIP-ready. Vincent said he wasn’t actually sure but he figured at the very least they would fold the leading edge of the toilet paper into a little triangle.

Total deadpan—the same tone he’d used when he told her about his house being torched, and how he’d driven out here to get some perspective on everything. He seemed so indifferent to the matter, she wasn’t sure if he had some kind of superior temperament or if he was just missing something.

But she liked listening to him talk, so she asked him about that—the need for perspective—and Vincent said, ‘Have you read Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis?’

She told him she had, and Vincent explained how the central thesis had been a kind of revelation to him—as in, the whole idea that running time backward could be a corrective measure, morally. Like, something bad was actually something good, if you could only rewind time, see it in reverse.

He said, ‘One day the universe will stop expanding and shrink again, right? And I read somewhere that because space and time are coupled, when the shrinking sets in, time will reverse, and so because of the Amis principle, reversed time will reverse the moral status of events, and so good lives will manifest as bad lives, and vice versa. You know what I mean?’

‘Sort of.’

He said, ‘What I realised, if a life’s got too much grey area, it doesn’t matter if you run it forward or back—it looks the same, ethically. And I worried that was maybe the case for me, so I thought I should take some time and really think about it.’ He found her in the mirror, smiled—maybe embarrassed about all his philosophising—and said, ‘Anyway, what I’m trying to say is you should stay at a safe house.’

She smiled in return, but told him she wasn’t interested. Vincent was quiet for a while, maybe considering whether to keep at it. But then he said, ‘All right’—but she had to back him up if anyone claimed he hadn’t tried to sell it to her. They had places just as good as a hotel.