“That’s what you think.” She smiled and tilted her head a little. “So what do you say?”

For days now, I’d been wrestling with this, until now, hypothetical dilemma. On the one hand, I figured a failed crossing might pull her back to reality, but on the other I worried she might not be able to handle it if her elaborate fantasy-world was exposed as a fraud, that she would react badly and I might never see her again. But at that moment I decided the charade could not continue a moment longer, and that were I to refuse her invitation I would be complicit in her delusion. We were both lying on the bed. I had my head propped up on a pillow while Madeleine lay on her back. We locked eyes. I couldn’t help but feel a little appalled that I had allowed myself to do this, but within a few moments I felt my body begin to tingle all over with pleasure. This, Madeleine had told me, was the first stirring of the soul, which all people naturally feel when looking into the eyes of another. She believed the ability to cross was latent in everyone, only the teaching of it had been lost. This, she claimed, was why looking someone in the eye was such a powerful, and occasionally dangerous, act, because even the untrained soul stirs when gazes meet. Now, staring into her eyes, I preferred to think of it simply as love. What sorrows had she endured in her life, I wondered, a life about which, for all her stories, I still knew very little? I thought of her as one of those people defeated by hardship and solitude who conduct one-sided conversations on the street, loudly berating someone who exists only in their imagination. And so, looking into her eyes, tingling all over with pleasure, I was all at once flooded with tenderness for this woman, and for her woundedness. Her tales were merely a cover, a disguise, a front. Underneath them was a deeply, perhaps irretrievably, mislaid soul. The sadness of it overwhelmed me, and the image of her blurred, and I looked away.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I’m distracted. I was thinking about the auction tomorrow.”

Later that evening, Madeleine dressed and left the apartment as always. Before leaving, she gave me an exceptionally tender kiss. I thought she was trying to repair the unspoken rift that had emerged between us, but the next morning, when I woke and noticed she wasn’t lying beside me, I understood what it had really meant. She’d been saying goodbye. But she’d left me a gift. Lying on the bedside table was her derringer.