Keeping up with Mexico, with what I’d once called work, has become harder and harder. I’ve made slow progress with two major renewals, and I suspect my friend will soon want to raise her percentage of the commissions if I keep up this temporary-but-indefinite state of affairs. We’re in different worlds. Maybe I should sell my whole business portfolio and leave it all behind, just take a decision and keep delving deeper into this: my starting point. I could start to live, shedding burdens, starting over with the insurance company here, repeating a family history. But if I did that, I know I’d soon want to leave as desperately as I did when I was a teenager. Maybe I should do something that’s really mine, give shape to these lines I’m writing – more than just putting them away and returning to them when I’m old, when I’ve forgotten everything all over again and this is just a whisper in my memories, a moment of disorientation. First, though, I have to survive myself.

I’m the island again, an islander with all her muddles, her romantic fantasies. In one of all our possible adventures, maybe we can imagine something transformative together. That’s a consolation to me, given the body I have, a system perpetually hacking itself, always following orders to turn the cogs in the wrong direction. As part of this tropical dimension, I feel weak. These days, no machine or regimen has been able to keep me organised enough to halt my hypoglycaemia in the wee hours, when the duppy won’t stop its fitful roaming and my mind concocts relentless endings to this story. The house keeps entrapping me, and I go out less and less – but maybe staying here isn’t good for me, either. Maybe there’s nowhere on earth where I can escape my relapses, where the corners smile one after the other.

I’m struggling harder to imagine a happy ending: the crusade of lovers taking control is an increasingly unsustainable image, now that the whole island feels like a shipwreck, like the one I found not long ago in my own shadows. I still have it open on my computer – the document that informed me of Rebecca’s father’s death one day when the internet felt like cooperating.

I typed the name James Duncan Bowie in quotes. Google yielded a single result: the transcription of the hearings for an insurance claim lawsuit. I spent hours reading the document as if it were a good novel, entertained by the interjections of this party and that. There’s no topic that this particular descendant is better equipped to understand.