I know we know the story of Roger Davis really. I'm just filling in the blanks.

'My mom was telling the truth when she said I couldn't wait to move to New York. It was more for her than me that I waited as long as I did. It wasn't like there was much left here for me.' Roger made a vague gesture across the field in front of him, a gesture the sheep didn't even acknowledge. Now I tried my best to put myself in his shoes and see it all as he must have at the age of eighteen, impatient and ready for life to begin. I supposed it wasn't a huge leap from my own desire to escape England earlier that year; it had just taken me slightly longer to search for something beyond my own doorstep.

'A few of my friends went away to college the fall after graduation. The rest of us just kinda hung around and tried not to do anything stupid. By Christmas, three of the guys were engaged and one had got a baby on the way. When everybody went back to college after the holidays, I didn't see much point in hanging around any longer.'

As Roger lit his cigarette, I thought about what he must have left behind that winter. Delilah was just the tip of the iceberg. There were his parents, the friends he'd grown up with and the families' he'd known. And Rachel Zuckerman, whoever she was and wherever she'd ended up. Perhaps he was right and it had been nothing more than a brief fling. Or perhaps she'd wanted more, and Roger had broken someone else's heart as easily as breathing. Little would surprise me about him anymore, and yet right now all I could feel was an overwhelming sense of pity for the eighteen-year-old boy who had no idea how things would eventually work out.

'The thing my mom never knew though was how much I hated New York when I first got there.' A wry smile curled his lips into a mocking grin directed at his younger self. 'It was too big and noisy and fast for a country boy like me. If it wasn't for how much I wanted to prove my dad wrong, I'd have got the first train back out of there and come home. Maybe I should have done.' He shrugged and flicked ash onto the grimy snow at his feet. 'Whatever. I didn't anyway.'

'What did you do?' I spoke for the first time in several minutes, unsure whether I should remind him I was there or not. It had seemed as though he were talking half to himself and I wondered if my interjection would jerk him out of his reverie and urge him to tell me the story in as few words and as quickly as possible. I hoped not.

'I holed up in a hostel for a few days. Then, when I was pretty much broke, I met Mark.' He smiled and tried to hide it but I'd already seen, and it served to remind me that no matter how close Roger let me get to him, Mark would always have something more. There was a shared history there, an engrained affection which nothing could ever change. I couldn't compete with that. And, I realised now, I didn't have to; it was okay.

'He'd just dropped out of college and was looking for a room-mate and I fit the bill. I bet he regretted that later, but…' He took a lungful of smoke. 'It was good, you know? For a while. I was getting myself sorted for the first time in my life, actually doing something I gave a shit about. School had never been my thing, but this was. I spent a couple of years getting a band together and we were just getting somewhere. We could have been big. And then… then I met April.'

It was only the second time I'd ever heard him say her name and I wasn't expecting the slightly weary sigh which accompanied it. I wasn't sure just what I had been expecting – tears and tantrums, at least in public, weren't Roger's style, and so far he had been calm and disconcertingly composed as he related his history. That the mention of his dead girlfriend's name would produce a sound of exasperation rather than regret was unusual, but, I supposed, Roger had never pretended to be straightforward.

'April was a junior at NYU when I met her. She'd come along to one of our gigs and hung out afterwards. I'd seen her a few times before the night we finally got talking, I'd just never got around to saying hey. Looking back, I suppose it would have been better if I hadn't after all. It was pretty obvious she was strung out even then, but I guess I didn't see it. Or didn't want to. I don't know.' He shrugged and fell silent for a while, taking several long drags on his cigarette, perhaps trying to remember if he'd noticed anything unusual about her all those years ago.

I fought against my desire to know more for a few minutes, knowing that what I was about to ask was silly and petty and completely demeaned the entire tale Roger was sharing with me. But there it was, and finally it made its own way out. 'Was she pretty?' I blushed as he looked at me, and half-wanted to take it back. Then I left it. This was his life, it was part of him. Silly questions like this were part of me. It was time we both stopped denying who we were.

For a moment I though Roger was going to ignore the question. Then that smile reappeared, slightly rueful and sad, but there, and he blew out a mouthful of smoke. 'Not like you'd think. Not like you.' Before I could protest that I hadn't been fishing for compliments, he continued, 'Mark's got loads of photos of her somewhere. Probably some film too. You should see them some time. She was pretty ordinary looking really. But… she had these eyes.' Shaking his head, he realised he'd come to the end of his cigarette and stubbed it out against his boot. For a few seconds, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and stared out across the field. It seemed as though he was concentrating intently on something. Eventually, he said, 'There was just something about her. She was so different, so alive. She made everything more, somehow.'

I hoped I managed to keep the slight edge of bitterness out of my voice when I said, 'She sounds wonderful.'

'Yeah, she was. At least, I suppose she was.' It was like he was still trying to work this all out himself. Pulling a face, he said, 'The more I think about it, the more I wonder… It isn't that I didn't… love her. It's just… I'm not sure anymore where heroin ended and she began.' He shook his head. 'Sorry, you didn't want to hear this.'

I made a noise which I hoped signalled disagreement and waited to see if he would continue.

'Being with April was wonderful. Everybody loved her. I mean everybody. Mark had met Maureen by then and we formed this weird foursome. It was… good. Maureen adored her, April was like her idol or something. They were almost inseparable. At least until April's addiction took over anyway. Sorry, is it okay if I…?' He tailed off and pulled out his cigarettes again. I didn't reply; one more didn't seem too bad under the circumstances. He took a long drag as though it had been days not merely minutes since his last hit of nicotine, and breathed the smoke out. 'Anyway. After meeting April it all fell apart a bit. The band was doing well, like my mom said, we were close to getting a record deal. And I fucked up.'

'You didn't-' I began but he immediately interrupted.

'Yeah, I did. Believe me, Cat, I spent years pretending I didn't, blaming everybody else for what happened. But it was me. Just me.' He breathed out heavily, smoke curling up into the winter air. 'At first it was alright. Better than alright, it was… good. April always said it was like flying, like your feet weren't on the floor anymore, and she was right. It was probably the last thing she ever said that was right. But it didn't last long. Soon we were fighting over the stash, selling anything we could to find money. It was crazy. I remember…' He tailed off as he struggled to get the words out then finally continued. 'I remember when I found out that April had slept with the dealer that I didn't even feel anything. It was just like a fact or something, something necessary. I was more mad that she wouldn't share with me.'

Despite my best efforts to hide my momentary disgust, it must have shown on my face, as his eyes darted to my face and then down to the snow at our feet. 'Sorry, I know. I was a shit.'

'It doesn't matter.' I shook my head.

'It does.' And I knew for him that it did. I let him continue with his story, hoping that I'd disguise any further reactions. 'Anyway,' he continued, 'I did some horrible things. Stealing and stuff. I even stole off of Mark. The band fell apart and so did we.' In between those short clipped sentences, a whole other story was hidden, I was sure. That he'd chosen not to tell me anymore was clearly the way it was going to be. I let him do it. In truth, I wasn't sure how much more I could take anyway; whilst I knew now that whatever he told me would never change the way I felt about him, the grimier this picture became, the less impressed I was with myself for this blind devotion. It was so unlike me.

'Without the band, there was nothing to stand in between me and heroin. Those weeks kind of merge together.' He shrugged and took a drag on his cigarette, yet beneath his seemingly nonchalant exterior, I could see the tell-tale signs that what was to come next was the crux of it all, the reason that April had been haunting him all these years. Yet when the truth came, I wasn't ready for it. 'One day I came back from scoring and found she'd left me a note. I didn't really take in that she'd given me HIV at the time. Finding her body in the bathroom kind of took over. She'd killed herself,' he added for clarification. 'Slit her wrists. It was a very April-thing to do.'

'I'm… so sorry.' The words were nowhere near enough yet they were all I could say. My life had left me ill-equipped to deal with situations like this. Not for the first time, I felt decades younger than Roger, unable to comprehend how anybody could deal with all of this. He'd been the same age as I was now when this had happened; that he was still here and functioning at all was amazing.

Roger continued as though I'd said nothing, as though determined to get through this now at all costs. 'The next year was a blur. On drugs, off drugs. A few half-hearted overdoses. It wasn't until I got clean that I gave the HIV much thought. Everybody kept telling me I was lucky when my T-cell count came back reasonably high. Since then I've been on AZT and I seem to be doing okay. Lucky!' He snorted. 'That's one way of putting it.'

I tried to focus on the positives in this situation, as much for myself as for him. 'So you've been clean since then?'

'Almost. Apart from...' For the first time I felt guilty. When I'd insisted on him being honest, I'd never foreseen a tale like this. These things had happened so long ago, almost a lifetime ago for me, and yet they still had the power to eat into this man. Collins had told me that Roger had had a lot of deal with and I'd demanded he tell me everything anyway. I should have known better.

Now, as the silence dragged on, I said, 'You don't have to…'

'I want to.' Roger spoke with more determination than I'd ever heard from him before. 'I… need to. It's just… you're only the third person I've ever told this all to.' He gave me a weak smile before continuing, with a deep sigh. 'So. I finally got clean. Thanks to Mark. And Collins, but mainly Mark. I don't know why he didn't just leave after everything I'd done to him. I guess he's a sucker for punishment.'

'He cares about you,' I interrupted, unwilling to have any aspersions cast on the only best friend I'd ever had.

'I know. It's one of his worst qualities.' Roger breathed out a cloud of smoke as he smiled ruefully. 'And I know that's why I found him so annoying back then. He was desperate for me to get on with my life, to move forward and do something amazing. When I first met Mimi, I think it was more for his benefit than mine that I started seeing her. And then…' He shrugged as he said, 'then I fell for her.' The uneasy way he revealed it only made me all the more certain that he was telling the truth now. 'And it was stupid because we were so unsuitable, two addicts with HIV. And yet…'

'You loved her. You still love her,' I finished his sentence and found that I wasn't jealous at all. Mimi had lurked in the background of our relationship for so long that once upon a time I'd have resented the feelings that were still so clearly buried deep within him for this long-gone woman. Now all I could feel was an intense sadness that things hadn't worked out. After everything with April, the way he'd recklessly thrown all his dreams away without a thought until it was too late to do anything about it, he deserved something.

'She changed how I thought about things,' he said. 'She made me live again. Really live, I mean, not the existence I'd had since April died. And I fucked that up too.'

'But I thought she… died?'

'She did. It's just… I wasted so much time. I… pushed her away when she needed me the most.' He lifted his eyes to mine and then looked away, as though remembering how he'd repeated his mistake all over again not six months ago. 'I ran away. By the time I came back, she was sick. She got better but… well, you never quite get better. Not with this.' He studied his cigarette carefully as he said, 'She died about a year later. I started using again just before she died. It was stupid. I wasted another few months of my life on that stuff. I just couldn't believe that it had happened again. Mimi was supposed to be my second chance, the one I did right. I'll never learn. When I met you, I'd given up.'

Despite the serious subject matter, I smiled. 'I'd already guessed that.'

He smiled back. 'Yeah. I figured.' There was a pause before he added, 'I'm so glad you came back, Cat.'

The earnestness of his words widened the smile on my face. 'Me too.'

We sat in companionable silence for some minutes, watching as the sheep huddled together, occasionally nosing through the snow at the meagre blades of grass. Even through our winter coats, I could sense Roger's body relaxing against mine, as though every barrier left between us had gone now. The sense of freedom that had crept in when I was standing in Sid's guitar shop had now spread throughout my entire body. I couldn't remember the last time I'd breathed so easily. For perhaps the first time, I spoke without second-guessing myself.

'So if Mimi was your second chance, what am I?'

Roger answered without turning his head. 'My last chance.' He dropped the cigarette to the floor and ground it out with his heel, glancing in my direction. 'You're my last chance. And I won't fuck up again.'

It was less a promise than a vow, a steely determination not to make the same mistakes again. Given the history he'd just related, it was clear that it was a pattern which had been repeated throughout his life: the assertion that he'd changed, that this time, it would be different, and then the descent into misery and the devastating consequences. It wasn't a comforting thought. And yet I believed him, believed that he wanted to change.

It was enough for me