Time passes like a silk ribbon through her fingers. Every hour spent as Pliny’s guest sees her fall more deeply in love with his life, her days an endless procession of pleasures. She bathes alone in the private bath suite, has her hair dressed each morning, eats freely without considering the price of the food. Slowly, she feels her own body return to her. Nobody touches her without permission, still less with violence. In the beautiful garden, the brothel’s ugliness starts to take on a sense of unreality. But she still knows it is there, like the fading bruise on her arm.

Pliny becomes the obsessive focus of her hopes. She never spends as much time with him as she did on her first day—he is often busy receiving guests or dining out—but every night, she reads to him and falls asleep under the weight of his hand. She sits in the shadow of the colonnade, watching silently when guests call on him in the garden, trying to learn more about his habits, his views, anything that might allow her to make herself indispensable to him. He would be a good master, she tells herself, imagining her life as his secretary. Even if he lost interest in her, if she became a half-forgotten beautiful object in his home, something to set alongside the flowers or the fountains, her voice would still be useful to him, he would still treat her with kindness. Sometimes, alone in the garden, she thinks of the other women, of Dido most of all, and she longs to talk to her. Then she is flooded by guilt at her planned abandonment. She tells herself elaborate lies: that if Pliny bought her, she would persuade him to buy Dido too, that her own good fortune could be shared. She tries not to think of Menander, the memories are as painful to hold as burning firewood.

On her sixth day at Pliny’s house, her fear of being sent back to the brothel is so intense, she cannot read. He’s said nothing about her leaving but has not mentioned extending her stay either. She is sitting silently in the garden, hidden in the shadows, when two of Pliny’s acquaintances visit.

They stand gossiping by the fountain as they wait for him. It is a while before she realizes what they are talking about.

“. . . I don’t know why he picked her up. Only Pliny could be so eccentric, taking home some funny little Greek girl who sang at a party.”

Startled, she turns her attention to the speaker. He is much younger than Pliny, with an arrogant, self-satisfied air. He reminds her of Quintus.