She remembered telling Emma that she wanted someone clean, because a lack of hygiene meant that nothing else counted. Sobriety, she realized, was just as important. She might even have been thinking about sobriety all the time. Clean was another word for sober, after all. You could have the same taste in everything, have the same number of qualifications, share the same sense of humour and the same politics, but a vicious dependency would cut through it all and you were left with a thousand pieces of thread that nobody could knit together again.
