I sat down on one of the milk crates, rolling myself one last pre-shift cigarette and tapping the end with my index finger before I put it in my mouth. The door kicked open and Dex came out, his cigarette already rolled and perched between his lips. He pushed his dirty blond hair out of his face and lit it.

‘Sorry, Nona,’ he said, sounding almost genuine.

I shrugged, lighting my rollie and inhaling hard. ‘For what?’ I watched the smoke trail out of my mouth as I spoke. ‘Nothing you haven’t seen before, right?’

He laughed.

‘So you’re back?’ I asked, taking another drag.

‘I’m back. Started yesterday. I missed you.’

‘Sure you did.’

‘Nobody made me a coffee.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Diddums.’

I’d been at Sawyer’s a few months when it happened. Nic had told me to play along but he’d also told me to be careful and I’d shaken my head and told him I could handle myself.

I thought I could. I’d been careful my whole life.

Dex wasn’t my type. He was obnoxious and condescending and sometimes he quoted obscure Radiohead lyrics in the middle of conversations, as though that made him an intellectual, and he had a steady stream of fangirls who’d sit at the end of the bar and wait for him to finish his shift. They were all wide-eyed and fine-featured, and looked much too young for him.

Or maybe he was more my type than I wanted to admit, overconfident and cocksure and spoiled, and when he pulled me into a doorway after a long night of drinking and kissed me against a stranger’s letterbox, I let him, and I let him take me home.

It was the night after Valentine’s Day and it felt like there were couples everywhere, pretending to be happy. I’d been on edge for weeks, dreading it. He was a distraction, a Sawyer’s rite of passage, and I was a notch on a bedpost, a tick on a scorecard. We’d used each other, and I’d thought that was it, done and dusted. But he’d walked me home the next night and it had happened again, and again, and then I didn’t know what to think. Didn’t want to think at all.

I blamed vodka. I blamed insomnia. It was bad then, the insomnia, tempered only by the aforementioned vodka and the exhaustion I felt after a long shift on the floor, and it made me do stupid things. I’d been warned, but I’d let him in anyway. Every cell of my body screamed at me to stop, walk away, be careful, but I didn’t, I wasn’t. He was like a drug—one I didn’t really like but couldn’t say no to.