I have left out so much, and yet there is no time now to go back and put it in its proper place. I’ve had no time to explore my (brief) conversion to Truffidianism under Bonmot’s guidance after my unfortunate accident. I’ve not dwelt on my two miscarriages. Or that I was a drug addict for most of my adult life. That I loved Sirin, for many years, in secret, and that we slept together a few times four or five years ago. That—and I am so sorry for this—that I am the one who told Bonmot about Duncan’s relationship with Mary. (I suspected. At the time, I would have been beyond furious; I never would have talked to you again. But now I see that that isn’t what destroyed my relationship with her.) That I stole Duncan’s journal from his apartment months before he left for the underground, long before I acquired the trunk. (Again, I had a suspicion it was you.) That there are definitely things walking up and down the tunnel at my back. That not everything I have told you is the truth as Duncan saw it. That my typewriter glows so brightly that I no longer need a lamp to see. That Duncan’s glasses are in my shirt pocket, dormant, waiting for me to put them on.

None of that is important next to what I do have time to share with you, because I think I finally made Mary Sabon see—really see. It wasn’t Duncan. It was me who did it.

How? A stroke of good fortune, and Truff knows I deserved one. About two months before Duncan’s final disappearance, I led a group of insufferable snobs around the city—the type who sneer at anything genuine and delight in the false; the less truthful the better. Yet they turned out to be falsely snobbish themselves, once I saw them in another light—one was Martin Lake’s new agent, David Frond, and two were his friends, visiting Ambergris for the first time. It was truly a miraculous intervention. When David found out who I was, the look he gave me made it clear he had thought I was dead. The thrill rising in my chest was because he knew my name at all.

After we talked for a while, David offered me a job rounding up Lake’s old artist friends and getting them to display their work at a gallery show doubling as a party for Lake’s fiftieth birthday. With any luck, he’d let me coordinate the party as well, he said. It was certainly a better offer than anything Sirin had brought my way in quite some time.

“It will be a regular parade of ghosts from Martin’s past,” he said, smiling.