“You wanted to talk in here?” Amara replies, her voice rising with hysteria. Even with the curtain closed, they can still hear Cressa weeping, the sound of Beronice with a customer next door, and Victoria, now rowing with Thraso, yelling at him not to let thugs into the brothel.

“Where else do we have?”

She sees the quiet sadness in his face and knows, without question, that he is telling the truth. Her relief is almost more painful than the shock before. She walks to him, puts her arms round his neck and rests the side of her face against his. “You paid to talk to me.”

“I didn’t want to wait until December,” he says, holding her tightly. “I’ve been saving for a while. Rusticus is in favor of his slaves getting some pleasure; he thinks it keeps us all more obedient.”

“But you mustn’t spend your money like that!” she says. “You need it. You need to save it.”

“I needed to see you.”

She thinks of Rufus, of all the ridiculous things she said that evening about love, of all the lies she told. “I can’t give you anything; I have nothing,” she spreads her arms out to illustrate the empty cell. “I don’t even own myself, my own body, my own life.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then what are we doing?” She sits down on the bed. “What are we doing here talking.”

“I know that you’re lonely,” he says, sitting beside her. “I’m lonely too. But I don’t feel it when I’m with you.”

“It hurts so much afterward though,” she says, leaning her head on his shoulder, letting him hold her again. “It just hurts.”

“Because it makes you think of home, and all we lost before.”

“Not just that,” she says. “Do you know how many men I’ve been with? I didn’t want any of them, but it happened anyway, and it’s my life now, and I have to accept it. And then I see you, the only one I actually have wanted, and even though we are alone together now, and there’s nothing to stop us, even though you paid my fucking pimp for me . . . I just can’t. Not in this place. I can’t.”

“I know,” he says. “I won’t ask it of you. Not here.” He leans over to kiss her on the temple. “But we can belong to many places. Don’t you ever think of yourself as being somewhere else?”

Amara thinks of Pliny’s garden, the smell of jasmine and the splash of the fountain. “Yes,” she says.