I’m sure Tom’s fine, he says.

If he’s fine, why didn’t he come home for Christmas? she says.

He didn’t fancy the full house. Look, I’m sure he’s okay, Jules. That drug he’s on just makes him forgetful.

The dog – who these days sits habitually at Logan’s feet, rather than at his wife’s – looks from Logan to Jules with childlike eyes.

Jules says, What if it makes him forget – I don’t know – to look when he’s crossing the road?

Logan feels himself beginning to worry too.

It’s really important you focus on what you want, not what you don’t want, he says. Imagine him safe and protected.

Then I would be deluding myself, says Jules. It’s not an easy world out there, and Tom’s particularly vulnerable. Anything could happen.

How does one begin the conversation? Whatever these processes are – the processes by which our thoughts transmute into our realities – even he is comparing them to magic, and after the age of nine or ten, everyone knows that magic is only, and always, illusion. Jules is unable to hear him, so the page is his confidant. Logan must keep this secret: the rational view is the illusion. The view that humans are accidents of random mutation, victims of circumstance, meaningless collections of cells – that consciousness is an accidental side-effect of brain function – that is the laughable nonsense. He has known himself part of a connected whole and has felt through the interconnected parts of this larger self into limitlessness. This interconnectedness is behind everything. When it raises its head from time to time, it’s dismissed as coincidence. But there is no coincidence. How can one express such a thing and not sound like a loon? What is the science?

He e-mails Gabrielle Salmon with this question. What is the mechanism by which thoughts become reality? Before the end of the day she responds. Something about collapsing quantum waves of probability into a particular outcome, but he doesn’t get it. And in any case, it’s just a theory; nobody knows.