Sometimes now, when I can’t sleep for worry or boredom or both, I like to play a game with myself. I try to pin down the exact moment I fell in love with Madeleine. I am quite certain that when she began her story, I was not in love with her, or at least I hadn’t realized I was in love with her. I hadn’t fallen in love for years. I considered myself inoculated against it. But by the time she had told me her story—which was only her first story, the first of many—something had changed inside me: I was unexpectedly, reluctantly, wholly in love, not just any love but a consuming love, an unwanted love, an inconvenient love, the kind of love that a man wants to be cured of, that makes a man feel ashamed of himself, only the more he denies it the more entangled he becomes, like one of those nautical knots that tightens with every pull. It felt like an infection, a sudden illness, in which everything is at once the same as it was before and yet transformed. Being in love is a kind of hypnosis and, as any hypnotist will tell you, to be hypnotized one must secretly want to be hypnotized, so secretly that one doesn’t even know it. Falling in love is an act of involuntary will.