Dear Diary,

I’m so excited, I need to get this down right now. I can’t do anything else. I haven’t even left yet. I’m sitting in my car. My god. My hands are shaking.

I met him.

I had to meet him. Since I was a kid I’ve known there was something different about me, something bad. I’ve lived my whole life feeling that awful absence of hope, that whenever the real me was exposed, my life would be over. There was no coming back from it, from public knowledge of my true nature. I’d confessed as a kid to my shrink, who’d helpfully passed it on to my mother. But Mum had of course shrugged that off as a teen being weird and never told another living soul. As I grew I knew a single drunken slipup, a half-sure sighting of me staring too hard at someone’s kid or talking inappropriately about pedophiles, sympathizing, reasoning: that would plant the seed. The seed that grows and grows, that no amount of pulling or poisoning can destroy. Every human interaction held the potential for it. Every word. Every movement. Every handshake. Every hug. I was a balloon wobbling and rolling around everywhere, knowing any second everything could spill. My sickness. My virus.

Deadly exposure.

Ted Conkaffey. He’d been through the fires and come out alive, a broad-shouldered hero emerging in slow-walking silhouette from the flames. Supervillain. My great white hope. Yes, he was scarred, war-torn. The Ted Conkaffey who I’d watched, transfixed, on Stories and Lives wasn’t the fresh-faced, grinning guy of the uni graduation photos the press so loved to bandy about. The man I’d seen so briefly on that fateful day exiting his car, approaching my girl. He was deflated. But he was alive. I wanted to be in his presence, even if it was just to look gratefully into the eyes of the man who had endured my death for me.

Of course, I was nervous. The more nervous I am, the earlier I arrive at a place. So I got to the Lord Chesterton Hotel just as lunch was finishing, when Ted’s appearance hadn’t been slated until three that afternoon. There had been the necessary provisions to make. The podcast, which of course I’ve listened to extensively, asked listeners to go into a lottery to be allowed to attend the meeting. I knew I couldn’t risk that. With hundreds of thousands of listeners Australia-wide, I’d never make it, and I didn’t want my name on some list of attendees in case it ever came around to bite me. A deep-web contact was able to get me the address and the meeting time. It’s very useful to have people on the internet who can break into places and get you what you need like that, the same kind of people who can source you special delightful things that might get you into trouble if you went through the more obvious channels.

The Lord Chesterton Hotel was a good choice, I thought. Cozy, chipped sandstone and old fireplaces, long tables downstairs evoking the heyday of establishments like these full of shipmen from the harbor down the hill yelling and slamming down beer glasses. Big portrait of a proud-chested blond man in a military uniform in the main room—hands on hips, surveying the battlefield. Narrow carpeted stairs led past framed relics from the pub’s history to the planned meeting place—a small private room off the side of the empty fine-dining restaurant. I crept, rigid with anticipation, up the stairs and along the creaking floors, deciding I’d get a look at the room before everyone arrived, plant myself before those who would check names off a list closed the room to gawkers. I didn’t for a moment expect Ted to be there this early. But there he was. Sitting alone at the little bar. I knew the outline of the back of his head, the thick skull and big hand gripping a polished rocks glass of some honey-colored liquid.

I was so nervous I could hardly move. Here he was! The other me. The man I would never be, could never be. Both so much more than I was, in strength, in quiet resilience, and so much less than me. So far out of reach of the sacred darkness in which I kept my secret. Exposed man. Ted Conkaffey was everything I’d ever feared. When he turned toward me, and his eyes met mine, I felt a stab of exhilaration in my chest.