Why had he indulged me so? I have considered the matter many times since, and my only answer, unsatisfactory as it may be, is the memory of that first glance he gave me the day of our first encounter in the lobby of the Baudelaire Society. Perhaps he had found an unexpected solace in our friendship, a relief from what would otherwise have been a crushing loneliness. And as I was the only soul in the world who truly knew him and his secrets, he showed me something I would never have expected of him: he showed me mercy. That mercy mixed with solitude and became love. I in turn had found solace in him, I in turn had loved him, the way one loves a sparring partner, a cellmate, or an enfant terrible, knowing it to be dangerous, painful, wrong even, but doing it anyway, out of fatalism, defiance, or compulsion.

As for the mystery of Mathilde’s disappearance, I never received a satisfactory explanation from her, but I suspect there was more to it than just grief. The double loss—and in such dreadful circumstances—of her son and Édmonde would have unhinged the sturdiest mind, but there was more to it even than that. Artopoulos had only just joined the Baudelaire Society, the first new member in more than a decade. I imagine, upon his arrival, he assumed his characteristic quasi-aristocratic entitlement over the place, as if Mathilde had merely been keeping the chair warm for him. Something had occurred between the two of them, soon after the news of the murders of Lucien and Édmonde, something that forced her to flee. Perhaps he’d attacked her, perhaps he’d admitted to his crime, perhaps it was something else altogether. Whatever it was, it was something vicious, something cruel, something unforgivable. Mathilde never told me the full story, and what little she revealed was only ever let slip or hinted at, but I remembered my encounter with Mehevi on the island decades earlier and no further explanation was required. Thereafter, my vigilance around Artopoulos was only heightened, and I began orchestrating an almost imperceptibly gradual cooling of our friendship.

I rented Mathilde an apartment on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis and saw to it that she lived a life of ease. I was overjoyed that—despite everything—she had survived. I visited her every day. We shared our sorrows about Lucien. Other than Artopoulos, she was the only person in the world who knew me truly, but I kept them hidden from each other. On one occasion, I managed to smuggle the story Charles had written out of the Baudelaire Society library and read it aloud to her. She showed me none of her previous resistance. Time, memory, our reunion, the death of her son, perhaps even the shadow of her own mortality, all of these seemed to have softened her opinions on the subject of crossing. When I raised the possibility of undertaking another crossing, she didn’t dismiss me as she once might have done, but rather listened with an open mind. Within a few months, she agreed that the time had come. She never gave up peddling books—it was her way of finding a new body. The only problem, she often complained, was that no one ever wanted to look an old woman in the eye.