“Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.”

They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts, even from our pity.

After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whisky in the towel.

“Want any of this stuff? Jordan?⁠ ⁠… Nick?”

I didn’t answer.

“Nick?” He asked again.

“What?”

“Want any?”

“No⁠ ⁠… I just remembered that today’s my birthday.”

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.