Salvius sets down the candle on a small table and picks up his wife’s robe. “Would you perhaps mind . . .?”

She takes it from him. He turns away as she changes. It makes her shiver, wrapping herself in a dead woman’s clothes. The sadness of her own loneliness, of Salvius’s grief, brings a lump to her throat.

“That’s her perfume over there.” Amara picks up the bottle, dabs a little on her neck. Salvius stares at her. “You look so like her.” He sighs. “Is there someone you would like me to . . . I mean, I can pretend to be someone else, if that’s easier?”

Of all the things Amara expected him to say, this was perhaps the last. The wall outside the Sparrow blazes into her mind, the new graffiti she spotted there only this morning. Kallias greets his Timarete. “No,” she says, emphatically. “That wouldn’t help.”

“I’m sorry,” Salvius says. “But is there, perhaps, at least a memory of being with somebody you liked?”

“No.”

“You have never been with a man by choice?”

“No.” The simplicity of his question and the truth of her answer hits her with unexpected force. She turns her face away.

“I’m sorry,” Salvius says. He sits down on the bed. Amara sits beside him, unsure what to say.

“It’s not your fault,” she says at last. “I am still happy to be here with you.”

“You don’t have to pretend,” he says, taking her hand. “You must have to do a lot of pretending.” She doesn’t contradict him. “Have you ever . . . felt anything?”

Has she ever felt anything? What a question. A thousand answers crowd her mind. All the sensations of her life as a prostitute: disgust, panic, the obliterating blankness. An aversion to being touched so intense she is amazed she has got through a single night at the brothel without screaming, without fighting the men off. But she knows this is not what Salvius is asking. “No,” she says quietly. “I never feel anything.”

They sit together in silence. “Sabina was very afraid at first,” he says. “It took her a long time to get used to being together.” He puts his arms around her, drawing her closer. She wonders who he is seeing when he looks at her—the woman in front of him, or his dead wife. “Amara,” he says, as if answering her question. “I will try and make this pleasant for you. All I ask is that you don’t pretend.” He brushes a strand of hair from her face, correcting himself. “Don’t feel you have to pretend.”