I felt a tug in my head. It was like when you have something on the tip of your tongue, something you know backwards to forwards, but you just can’t put it into words at that moment.

I suppose it should have made me feel more frustrated—this new little intrusion added to my inability to grab and hold a strong memory of Joe—but instead, it brought me the oddest feeling of comfort. And then . . . and then . . .

I was back there in that memory. In my Lee Street apartment. Or at least my every sense told me I was. I looked to the window. The blinds were still up and a gentle snow was falling, just as it had been the night Joe came by.

This is good, I thought. I’m going to have that memory for Timony now.

Except there were a hundred other snowy nights that I was living there when Jilly dropped by. And this time, when the door of my apartment opened, it was Jilly who was standing there with snow dripping from her unruly hair, not Joe.

She had a bundle under her arm. Unwrapping the brown butcher’s paper, she took out a painting, and I saw the familiar flower fairies cavorting in a junkyard. That let me place exactly the when of this memory. It was the night after one of her shows at the Green Man Gallery. Throughout the show there’d been a “sold” sticker on the painting she was offering to me here in my apartment. Now I realized that the sticker had only been there so that she could show the painting and then give it to me after.

Because I’d loved it so much. The two little gnomish guys in one corner, playing fiddle and bodhran, using old tin cans for seats. And the flower fairies dancing to their music—like Cicely M. Barker’s, but still very much Jilly’s own, wearing the accoutrements of their naming flower, only punky, kind of raggedy versions of how Barker painted them.

But I could hardly look at the painting.

I’d forgotten all about Joe, I was so relieved to see Jilly again.

Or at least I was until I realized that this wasn’t real. This was a memory. I remembered it so clearly. In those days I never locked my door, and she’d come right in without bothering to knock to find me sitting at the kitchen table with my fiddle on my lap as I was transcribing a new tune.

She’d grinned at me and said, “So what do you think, Geordie, me lad? Can you find a place to hang this old thing?”

Except this time she didn’t. This time she laid the painting on the table and stood there looking at me with the saddest expression.

“Oh, Geordie,” she said. “I’ve done a terrible thing.”

I couldn’t seem to find my voice.