Philos returns the pressure of her fingers, holding her hand so tightly that for a moment she thinks he is not going to let go. He runs his thumb over hers, slowly enough to be obvious it is not an accident. Then he releases her and steps away. They keep walking, not looking at one another or acknowledging the contact. He cannot have held her hand for more than a heartbeat, the street seller has barely past them, but it feels to Amara as if time has jumped.

“It was strange seeing the slave market from the other side.” Her heart is thumping so hard, she does not pause to think about what she’s saying, or why she suddenly feels the need to share something so personal. “Although Felix bought me at Puteoli, not here, I still dream about it. The things people do when they know you don’t matter. When they know you are nothing.”

“It’s not a rite of passage I’ve experienced,” Philos replies. “I’ve only been sold once, and that was privately.”

“It’s brutal. And now I’ve done it to somebody else.”

They have not been looking at one another, but at this, Philos glances at her. “We all do what we need to survive. And you and Drusilla will not be cruel. If it hadn’t been you, somebody else would have bought them.”

“That’s what I tell myself.”

“It’s true. Only fools think life is like a play, with any hope of holding on to your virtue.” He smiles, as if the words are nothing more than a joke, but they both know who the target is: Rufus, his theater-loving master.

Amara returns his smile but doesn’t dare fully acknowledge the insult to her patron. “I suppose I am not asking more of Phoebe or Lais than I endured myself. And I never minded Egnatius, at least. He was almost a friend to Dido and me.”

“How do you think you will feel, seeing him again?”

Amara pictures the last time she saw Egnatius, his heavily made-up face cracked from smiling, the way he fussed over Dido, dressing her hair with roses. Dido was always his favorite. The memory brings an undertow of sadness. “I don’t know,” she says.

The doorway to Cornelius’s house is twice Amara’s height and by far the grandest on the street. A sliver of light cuts through its half-open doors onto the darkening pavement. She and Philos do not go in that way, instead she guides him to a small door down a side alley, a less obtrusive way into the house. A porter lets them in, grease stains on his apron, leaving them to wait in a small, gloomy side room while he fetches Egnatius. Amara watches Philos as he stares round curiously at the paintings on the walls: Nymphs pursued by centaurs. Nothing in Cornelius’s house is very subtle.

“Darling!”