The moment I say it I wonder if it’s true, if I really am better for him than whiskey. As my brain clears I think of the time I brought him a drink in the sound closet at Elizabeth’s gala, when I was drunk and tried to flirt with him while Alistair was in the same building.

I’ve got a bad feeling that good people don’t bring alcoholic drinks to former junkies. I’ve got a bad feeling that good people don’t go on two-day benders with former junkies, that they don’t encourage a downward spiral like that.

Liam kisses me on the hair, rolls off. The carpet is itchy on my back, and I keep my eyes closed, because on the other hand, despite the fact that we might be bad for each other, I don’t want this to end. This is somehow beautiful and perfect and right, the two of us tangled and sweaty on the floor of my shitty rental living room.

I knew I missed him, even when I found out about the heroin and the overdose, even when I saw that video and had the sudden, horrible, wrenching realization of the first time we met. But I didn’t know I missed him like this, didn’t know that when he reappeared it would feel like the world clicking into focus again.

I bring his hand to my lips and kiss it, softly. I’m almost hoping he doesn’t notice, because there’s something about soft, tender hand-kisses that doesn’t line up with the way he growls I’ll make you come twice before we even fuck, but he does.

He laughs softly, pushes himself up on one elbow, and kisses my hand as well.

“There, now I’ve made it romantic,” he teases me, looking over at my face.

I don’t smile. Now that my lust is sated for once, my mind’s a whirlpool, and I’ve never been any good at lying.

“What is it?” he asks.

I swallow, my mouth suddenly dry.

You could keep this a fling, I tell myself. Liam could be someone you have amazing sex with sometimes and it doesn’t matter what he does with his life, because that’s all the two of you have to do with each other.

Your pasts don’t have to matter.

But I know what it feels like to tell myself bullshit. I did it more and more every day for three years.

“Frankie?”

I don’t have to tell him. I don’t.

But I do.

“It was you the night on the bridge,” I finally whisper.

He sits up, slowly, leans against the couch. I follow suit, sitting cross-legged in the middle of my living room, watching his face as he runs both hands through his hair. He looks away, his face unreadable.

“When did you remember?” he finally asks.

“When did you?”

Liam swallows, holds my gaze like he doesn’t quite want to tell me. I wait.

“The moment you walked into the pub,” he finally says, softly.

It’s not what I was expecting, for some reason. I blink, a little lost in his eyes, uncertain of what to say now.

“I thought about your face for a year,” he says, voice still soft and intense. “Everything else about that night is a blurry mess, colors and shapes and the sound of a train, except your face. I never could shake the way you looked when I told you I wished you hadn’t saved me, either, and I remembered it when I went back to rehab, and I remembered it when I moved to Shelton as a last-ditch effort to stay clean. And then one day, you walked in.”

I draw my knees together, bend them in front of me, lean my elbows against them.

“You look completely different,” I say, my eyes moving over his face. I can see a shadow of the man on the bridge, but I have to look closely. “You let me think we were strangers this whole time.”

I can’t look at him. I can’t. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be feeling, but I think I’m supposed to be upset and indignant, a woman lied to.

“We were strangers,” he says.

I don’t answer.

“It’s no excuse, you’re right. The truth is I couldn’t bear to tell you,” he says. “You saw me at my lowest, Frankie, or if not my very lowest then one of the deeper valleys I’ve been in. And then you walked into the pub and didn’t realize that I was the same pathetic drunk you’d had to talk out of jumping in front of a train, I just—”

I’m motionless, waiting.

“—I liked the way you looked at me then,” he says, his gaze still holding mine. “I wanted to be someone new. Shake all that off, be someone you might like, and every time I thought of telling you I thought of the way you’d look at me then and I couldn’t. I should have and I couldn’t.”

He swallows hard.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

I feel some of the tension melt in my shoulders, and suddenly I realize I was bracing myself for a fight. I was preparing to be told about why I was wrong and why I was the one who ought to be sorry.

But that didn’t happen. Liam just apologized. For real.

So this is what that’s like, I think.

“I found out when I googled you,” I say, still motionless. “There was a video, from a few years ago, and I hadn’t recognized you as the same person until I saw it—”

Liam stands suddenly, holds out his hand to me. I take it and he pulls me up, his serious green eyes boring into mine.

“There’s a diner in Hollywood that’s open until three in the morning and has fucking amazing ice cream sundaes,” he says, his voice still soft.

I fold my arms over my chest, stomach squeezing. This talk was going so well, and I want to fucking keep talking instead of pretending like nothing’s wrong and eating ice cream.

“No, Liam, we need to—”

“I was a junkie,” he says, and then squeezes his eyes shut. “No. I am a junkie, I’m an addict, an alcoholic, a degenerate, a fucking liar and an impatient arsehole.”

He opens his eyes, looks at me like he’s coring me to the soul.

“I’ve ruined most everything I’ve touched in my life, but I’m taking you on a date so I can explain myself,” he says. “Just the one. You can turn me down afterward, you can say you never want to see me again but let me do this one thing properly. Please, let me try to fix something. For once.”

I swallow, sigh, and then I feel myself nodding. It’s not the first time my stupid body has betrayed me to Liam like this, so I run one hand over my hair, try to contain the frizzy mess.

“Okay,” I say.

“There is one more thing,” he says.

I raise my eyebrows.

“Do you mind driving?”

* * *

The coffeeshop-slash-diner is a few blocks off the freeway, and we park in the gravel parking lot, then have to walk through the lobby of a Best Western until we’re greeted by a diner with stone façades, all covered in family photos, seemingly of different families.

“Sit anywhere,” says a waitress with dark hair, bright red lipstick, and swooping eyeliner.

We slide into a booth, both looking up at the wall covered in photos. Between the fashions on display and the grainy, blurry quality they all share, I think they were taken decades ago.

“I used to come here quite a lot,” Liam says, eyes running over the photographs. “I’ve got no idea who these people are, though.”

“When you lived here before?”

“If I was sober enough, which I was occasionally. Not that you need to be terribly sober to visit a diner at two in the morning,” he admits.

“Think anyone recognizes you?”

“I hope not.”

I raise one eyebrow, waiting for the story.

“What?”

“Don’t tell me you’re banned from a diner.”

“I was very rock and roll, Frankie,” he says, grinning. “There’s a certain kind of person who shouldn’t go from constantly broke to rich as Hades, and it’s me. Would you like to know how quickly you can spend a million dollars?”

“Oh, please,” I say. “You can do that by buying an apartment in Prospect Heights.”

“Sure, if you’d like to do it the boring way,” he says. “Or you can go on a cocaine binge, wake up in Vegas, take several handfuls of pills over the course of the next two days, at least some of which are bound to be the ecstasy you’re looking for, get drunk, get high, get drunk again, find yourself in the Ferrari dealership at three in the morning because Las Vegas doesn’t know the proper meaning of night...”

I sit there, listening, kind of amazed at the amount of drugs that one person can apparently do. It’s not like I’m a stranger to pot or Adderall, but rock star binges are another category entirely.

“I did crash that Ferrari while high on what I thought was just weed but turned out to have angel dust laced in it,” he says. “Someone handed it to me at a party.”

God, I’m boring by comparison, I think. While he was doing that, I was mostly sleeping, sewing, drinking tea and watching movies in my apartment with friends...

“Here’s some menus,” a guy with carefully coiffed black hair and thick-framed glasses says. “I’ll be right back to—”

“Actually, we’d like a waffle brownie sundae and a chocolate milkshake,” Liam interrupts.

The guy just blinks, like he’s baffled that someone in a diner just put in an order.

“And two waters,” Liam finishes.

“Sure,” the waiter finally says. “Be right back.”

“Two spoons!” Liam calls after him.

“You know I dumped the last guy who ordered for me at restaurants,” I say.

“He never ordered you a waffle brownie sundae,” he says. “Don’t worry, Frankie, I ordered quite right. Trust a junkie to know his sweets, at least.”

There it is, what we came for. My eyes drop to his arms in his t-shirt, a riot of tattoos: animals and instruments and musical notes and things I can’t even recognize because they’re too old and faded.

“Right there,” he says, his voice quieter, and he points to a spot on his forearm, just below the elbow.

I lean in, and then I see it. A shiny spot, a quarter inch across, the tattoo faded and wavy where the circle overlays it. I reach out one finger and touch it, and then I see the rest.

They’re nearly hidden by tattoos, but there’s a line from his elbow to his wrist. No, two lines. Three. My eyes widen, and I touch each circle one at a time, feeling suddenly out of my depth.

“I’m not in the habit of showing these off,” he says, his voice low gravel. He flips his arm over, points to a few more on the other side, a constellation on the back of his hand.

“I blew out the veins in both arms years ago,” he says. “When they took me to the hospital it took two nurses half an hour to get an IV in.”

He says it so matter-of-factly, not embarrassed or bragging.

“When you overdosed?” I ask, all four fingers on scars on the back of his hand.

“Right,” he says, and then makes his hand into a fist, raps his knuckles against the table. “I’ve never really told anyone what I’m about to tell you,” he says suddenly. “I mean, after the first two tries at rehab I joined NA and AA and I tried then, but they’ve got a damn script, they want to talk about your downfall and your rock bottom as if there’s ever only one, they have the exact same one-size-fits-all solution for every problem—”

He breaks off mid-sentence, looks at me.

“Right, I’ll not slag off on addiction support groups at the moment,” he says. “I guess I ought to start at the beginning.”

“It’s a good starting place,” I agree.

I’m nervous. I don’t know why I’m nervous, except that I’m out of my depth right now. I don’t know the first thing about addictions or addicts or how to deal with those problems or what to do if you think you might be falling for one.

Is there a roadmap for this? I wonder.

“The beginning’s in Yorkshire,” he says. “Age seventeen, with Gavin, when someone offered us a line of heroin.”

Most people who shoot up start out by snorting heroin. Google told me that.

“I went first. I was seventeen, I was stupid, I was fully convinced I could never die, all that. So I did it, and Gavin did it, and all I thought about the next forty-eight hours was where I could possibly get more of that lovely, lovely stuff.”

He spreads both hands palm-down on the table, and now that I know, I can see the pattern of small scars along the veins.

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” he says.

I shake my head.