“Oh yes,” I said, looking down at my hands, thinking of the way he’d played with my hair in the postcoital moments, sniffing it. As I’d left, he’d turned to me, the half-darkness of the shade-drawn room drawing a soft slope down his sagging belly, and said, “You’re lovely, kid. When can I taste you again?”

At the time, I’d thought the idea of sleeping with him over and over again would be work, real work. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t that much different than sleeping with a bad date because you had nothing to do or nowhere to sleep or because you wanted to be polite. But this was different—better—because I always got to have a secret. Men would buy me drinks, and use their best sweet talk, pull out all the stops to try to tumble me, trick me, onto their sheets. And the whole time, I’d be paying attention, jotting down the things they liked or didn’t, the things that could make Lou laugh, the things that we could use against them. They were always the helpless ones, in the end. I liked that. I liked that so much.

Lou and I fell asleep in the living room three-quarters of the way into the bottle. I woke up in the middle of the night, spinning, thirsty and bloated, the sugars of the dark drink swelling in my veins. I pushed myself up, feeling like a crust of bread that had been soaked through with liquid—with bourbon—and Lou was snoring a little, her head tucked into the corner between the couch and the fiddle-leaf fig she’d put next to the sliding glass door.

Months later, Lou would tell me, drunk, that the business had never been the same before me, that she hadn’t even known she needed me until I was there. That I was becoming indispensable to the Lady. That was the word she used, indispensable. “Do you know what that means?” she slurred. “It means you never get to leave me.” But that was fine. I never wanted to.

All of that was still a hope, then, as I sat there, watching Lou sleep, wondering why I didn’t leave that apartment, call my mother, eat crow. Lou’s hair—she wore it short then—was like a silky auburn halo around her head, one tendril reaching for her arrow-straight nose, the kind of nose the Greeks liked to sculpt for posterity. Her eyelashes flickered and she gasped—a bad dream. I reached out and pushed the hair out of her face and Lou sighed, rolled over. I thought to myself, Now you have a best friend. Now you have a home. And then I pulled myself to the bathroom on my stomach and threw up for hours.