One of these nights he woke up—it was dark—not in the narrow bed in the room with the mirror, but in Lottie’s bed, with Lottie. He’d not been so drunk that he couldn’t remember what had happened—it would be years before he drank like that—but he could not remember how it had begun, or whether he should be ashamed of himself.

In the morning she was blasé at the breakfast table.

“I hope you feel relieved,” she said.

“Yes,” he said while thinking, No.

“We could get married. Do you need to get married?”

“What do you mean?”

“To stay in England.”

“I’m English,” he said, and she laughed out loud. He had to show her his passport to prove it.

They didn’t sleep together every night, just once in a while, and he could never tell whose idea it was, who first inclined a head for a kiss, put a hand to the other’s waist. They seemed to be operating each other’s bodies. He wondered whether she felt it, too, whether the whole world did. The Sex Act, his father had once called it in an unsuccessful conversation: in which another body compelled your body to move in a lifelike way. It was a negotiation, but you were still yourself, there in your head, more than ever, actually. There were so many things to worry about. You could never lose yourself.

Why had she taken him in? Into her flat; into her bed (beneath which the puppets were stowed, a fact that Jack could never forget). There had to be a reason. An unhappy childhood? A child given up for adoption? She’d been beaten, she’d beaten somebody else, she’d been raised in a religion that forbid idolatry. She had a thing for teenagers. Once, in the middle of the night, he asked her.

“Why do I need a secret to be a terrible person?” she said.

“You’re not a terrible person.”

No solution to the puzzle of Lottie. No solution to the puzzle of Lenny.