The villa in Canggu was stone and teak and a ceiling fan that clicked on every rotation. It sat off a lane too narrow for cars. At night the salt came in with the incense in the courtyard, and the motorbikes never quite stopped being a fact. A gecko lived on the wall above the kitchen door. Thin walls. An open-air bathroom at the back of the house, a stone tub under a square of sky. We arrived Saturday with the light still high.

I am Ellie. I am twenty-nine, Melbourne, the pale kind of Australian that burns if it forgets. Nate is thirty-one, Black Australian, a body the Bali sun sits on as if it has always belonged there. We took the room at the end of the hall, the one with the window onto the side garden and a door that opened onto the same…