A child’s plastic potty was poking out from under the bed. Diana must have used it when she was sick, and it hadn’t been properly rinsed because there was a ring of pinkish grime near the base. I closed my eyes, but in closing them I lost my balance and had to sit on the edge of the mattress. I don’t know how Cory came to be sitting beside me, but as I swayed I bumped against him, and he put his arm round me, and he was offering me a glass of water from the bedside table. I took a sip and let my head fall against his chest. Close up he had a soapy smell, which struck me as familiar and bittersweet, like a memory from years ago. Perhaps Mum used to wash our clothes with the same laundry powder when Stella and I were small.

“I went into town first thing, before your dad appeared,” he said, placing a brown paper bag on my knees. “Bought you a present.”

I opened the bag and drew out a notebook. My throat tightened and I thought I was going to cry.

“I can’t write in this!” I said, turning the pages. “It’s way too beautiful.” It was one of those faux-leather hardbacks, with gold swirls up the spine and pages like vellum.

Cory kept his arm round me, stroking me from shoulder to elbow, and we sat without speaking for minutes on end. It’s funny, because I never got round to crying, and he never spoke, but somehow we emerged from that stillness into intimacy, the way you might after a tearful heart-to-heart.

Diana sighed and twisted onto her other side. I raised my head and Cory sat up straight, and we both started speaking at the same time.

“Dad will be wondering where I’ve got to.”

“You will stay, won’t you? Just a few days?”

Diana gripped the pillow slip. I couldn’t tell if she was awake or not, because Cory was blocking my view of her face. After a while her hand relaxed again.

“You’re not going to leave just yet?” he said. I looked for the joke—or the suggestion of a joke—lurking in his words, but he looked frightened. “I thought, after last night . . .”

There were reasons why I had to leave. There was Dad, for a start, and my drab desk at K&G Financial Services, and my membership at the pool: the weary pull of routine. And it would be so presumptuous to stay on; I wasn’t the kind of person to show up at a stranger’s house with my suitcase and make myself at home. I wasn’t, was I? I wasn’t the kind of person who falls in love over the course of a single, reckless night.