Menander helps her sit further back on the bed, so that he is leaning against the wall and she is against him, his arms all the way round her. “At night, sometimes, when I’m sleeping on the floor above the shop,” he says. “I imagine I am back in Athens. I picture walking through the street in the evening, back to my old home, the shop my father used to own. But it’s not my parents or my sisters waiting there for me, it’s you. I can see you in the hall, though you’ve never been there, and we talk, we have all the time we need.”

“I think of you in Aphidnai, sometimes too,” she admits. “But mainly I imagine us being somewhere else altogether. Somewhere we don’t even know yet.” Amara stops. What can she tell him really? That she thought of him when Rufus kissed her, that she wished it was him instead? Or that she told Rufus her heart was free because she cannot afford for it to be otherwise.

“Might it not be possible?” he asks, holding her even closer. “Slaves do marry, don’t they? Or Rusticus might grant me my freedom one day; he has no heir, nobody to take over his business.”

Amara cannot even begin to imagine Felix’s reaction to the first idea, and she doesn’t have the heart to tell Menander that every unscrupulous owner since the dawn of time has duped a talented apprentice into working harder with the vague promise of freedom one day. She can’t bear to destroy the fantasy. “If I had the choice, it would only be you,” she says.

They talk together through the night, and Amara can feel her loneliness ebb with every moment in his company. The brothel even starts to feel like a less terrible place, simply because he is there. She tells him about Pliny, about how she felt having those few brief days of freedom, and he tells her about the way he feels in the shop, the moments he forgets he is a slave, caught up in the business of creating a new lamp, a new object, just as he did in his life before.

They are lost to everything but each other, until it is time for lock-up, and Thraso arrives to throw any lingering customers out.

“Fuck off now,” he says, barging into the cell. “You’ve more than had your money’s worth.”

Amara tries to kiss Menander goodbye, but Thraso comes between them, shoving her hard. She sees Menander react instinctively to step in.

“No!” she shouts. Amara looks at Menander, shaking her head. “Please.” She cannot bear the self-loathing on his face, their shared understanding that he is powerless to protect her from Thraso, or from anything else.