Victoria led the way to the front and sat down. Milton had always preferred the back row—far easier there to avoid speaking—but this wasn’t his meeting and, if Victoria preferred the front, that was okay with him. The others attending were a disparate group, with a mixture of locals and ex-pat Westerners.

Frank said a few words in Indonesian, and Victoria whispered in Milton’s ear, “He’s explaining that the meeting is in English, just in case there’re any new arrivals who don’t know.”

Frank switched to English. “We have a guest this morning.” He turned to Milton with his hands spread in a welcoming gesture. “Would you introduce yourself?”

“I’m John,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic.”

The room responded with the usual joint acknowledgement and greeting. The secretary led them through the preliminaries before welcoming the member who was going to share his story. The man introduced himself as Lucas and explained that he was originally from California but that he had come to Bali for the weather and the surfing.

He cleared his throat as he looked for the right place to start his story. “I want to talk about grandiosity. That’s the main symptom of my addiction, at least for me. I know a lot of us feel the same way. We have low self-esteem most of the time, but we use grandiosity as a way to hide our vulnerability and low self-worth. That was me, anyway. I managed to get into a place where I hated myself, but I still believed I was better than everyone else. You know what we say in the room: I was lying in the gutter and still looking down on everyone else.”

There was a ripple of approval. Milton had always tried to find the similarities in a share rather than the differences; it was hard, sometimes, but not today. He leaned forward avidly. It was as if Lucas was speaking to him and him alone.

“I was lucky enough to have some amazing friends—people who stuck by me through some awful lows—but, even though they were smart and funny and switched on, I still thought I knew better, all the time. I’d give them advice I was catastrophically unqualified to deliver, and then I’d ignore all of their own help and direction, even though the fact that they weren’t raging alcoholics, and I was made, their advice infinitely better than mine. Anyway—long story short, I ended up alienating all of them, and when I finally hit the bottom, I did it on my own. It’s different for all of us, but bottom for me was standing on the cliffs at Pecatu and trying to think of a reason why I shouldn’t jump.”