When you have been in love with someone in the past, there are a million small trapdoors you can fall through that would take you right back.

He looks up at the sound of the gravel crunch on the driveway, and I catch a flash of impression, a reclusive animal surprised in his lair by the arrival of the hunters.

There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.

No action comes divorced from motive, neither in art nor in life.

I do it even now, you see? I play false, I dance and dance. I murmur the stories in shadow or half shadow; I pretend to myself that I don’t remember the names, the details, when in fact I do. I did and I do – I remember all their names.

Alison sends a long look out across the river, at the rowers, the ducks, the clouds easing along in parallel with the water line. She is not the first girl I ever kissed, but she remains the one I’ve kissed the most, in all my life thus far.

And surely some large proportion of the world’s current danger and decline is not inevitable but rather the result of people scrambling fearfully away from the things that have long made sense.

I don’t know.” I shake my head slowly, look out the window at the parking lot, lift my cup of coffee for one final sip. “I feel like I wasn’t made for these times.” “I don’t know, kid,” she says. “I think maybe you’re the only person who was.

Sandy leans forward and kisses me, and I kiss her back, pressing myself against her, my excitement about the investigation rolling over, accelerating, transforming into that other big feeling, that exhilarating and terrifying feeling – not love, but the thing that feels like love – bodies rising to each other, nerve endings opening up and seeking each other – a feeling I know, even as it floods into my veins and my joints, that I will probably never feel again. Last time, for this.

She keeps talking, and I keep listening, writing down every word she says, even as some hungry part of my mind flies off into a corner, huddles with this new information – a morphine addict, some kind of opiate, for a period – and begins to chew on it, taste its marrow, decide how it might be digested. Decide if it’s true.