If someone had told you two years ago that you’d be speaking with a man roughly five years older than you in the dead of night, taking drags from the same cigarette as the moonlight cast in through the window, you’d have laughed them out of the room. And yet fate had different ideas as to where your life would lead.

“…and I’d had to run out of there before they caught me, those girls…I still remember how the sirens rang in my ears hours after I left.”

Francis was regaling you with tales of his past—he’d lived such a life for someone under the age of thirty—this particular one being about a scandal involving more than one prostitute and a few drugs. “I’d like to think I’ve calmed down a bit since then,” he said with a wry grin, “but I haven’t, really. Not with all this business…” Trailing off, he looked out the window into the garden before turning back and meeting your eyes.

“Et toi? Have you any stories to repay me with? I like to think of stories like that—currency, that is…apologies, I’m digressing. Go ahead.”