But none of the recovered knowledge erased what he had acquired on Gold Mountain. The two sets of memories coexisted, side by side and antithetical; he could not make them meet inside his head. He was like a planet circling a single sun, so that only half of his surfaces were illuminated at any one time. But nightfall did not obliterate one nor daylight make the other paramount. He watched the revolving scenery in his mind and wondered when he would succumb to madness.

He tried over and over to plan a trip to Inrhio, but he could not bring himself to make the travel reservations. It was not that he was afraid to see Leesa, wracked with worry over the pain he would inflict on a kind and innocent soul—he should have been, but he was not. What held him back was this surreal lassitude, this inability to fully function, this strange detachment that, despite his best efforts, allowed him to slip weightlessly through his own life. And yet it was unfair to Leesa to fail to tell her how signally her life had changed. Even in his dreamy state, he recognized that.

She forced the issue by arriving in the city one evening only twelve hours after she had alerted him that she was coming. “I’ve taken a hotel for the first two nights, because I have no idea what you’ve planned these days,” her note informed him. “If you’re free, come to me this evening. If not, send me a note. Can’t wait to see you.”

So he dutifully presented himself at her room as soon as he finished work for the day. She seemed pleased to see him, but preoccupied. She had come to the city on business, and not all her transactions had proceeded smoothly.

“I’ll have to run these figures by mother, because she’s much better at numbers than I am, but I don’t think this is the yield we were expecting,” she told Nolan, still frowning down at some papers. She was dressed in a flowing summer frock of froth and aqua, and she looked like some sea goddess who had drifted in on the evening tide. Nolan could not help thinking how beautiful she looked, but the thought was distant; it chimed in his head like some faraway bell.

Eventually she laid the papers aside and smiled at him across the room. She was seated behind the massive, impersonal desk. He had draped himself across a flowered sofa. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in so long, and here I am going on about unimportant things. How have you been? I’ve heard practically nothing from you this past month or so.”

“Busy,” he said. “Odd things have been happening.”

She crossed the room to come sit in the chair beside him. She took his hand and held it on her lap. “What odd things?”