I sense her shadow as she comes over to the bed in her bare feet, the slight cooling effect as it falls on my face. It’s one of those days when life could tip either way.

“I love you,” she says. “I love you and I want you forever and beyond, in this life and every other.”

“And I love you, Edwina Tomlin.”

I feel growing relief, and now I recognize the feeling that causes this relief. So this is love!

Seven days later, we know that we shall get married in Brittany later in the summer.

EDDIE HAS BENT over to drink from the fairy-tale spring. That’s what we called it when we were kids, the point on the D127 to Trémazan near Saint Samson’s chapel. The water flows directly out of the rock. An old stone tub and a sculpted standing stone stand beside the old spring, which is said to have made children’s wishes come true. The gorse blazes yellow nearby.

“Let’s have a baby, Henri,” she says to me. She’s beautiful in her white dress. A little earlier, as we stood in the eight-hundred-year-old chapel of Saint Samson, the goose pimples formed a magnificent pattern on her skin.

“Time weighs less here,” she whispers.

“Time is thinner here,” I reply. “Places like this have a greater concentration of miracles than anywhere else in the world.”

“If we ever get lost between different dimensions of time, let’s meet up again here,” Eddie whispers into my ear. “Deal?”

“Yes,” I answer. “I love you. Please forgive me if I don’t always get everything right.”

“Stop thinking in terms of right and wrong,” she says. “Those categories don’t exist. Just live your life, won’t you? Just live your life.”

We take another sip from the spring. Today the sea is dressed in a dark turquoise robe embroidered with little white foaming crests. The wind is driving the Atlantic and the Channel into headlong collision, and the Iroise Sea swells and froths between the two. It is the world’s most beautiful sea, and I’m with the world’s most beautiful woman.

Tomorrow we shall drive on along the coast. I want to show Eddie everything: Le Conquet, the Pointe Saint Mathieu, the Baie des Trépassés, and the Île de Sein, where time is at its most permeable and all unlived lives meet with virtually nothing to separate them.

We walk hand in hand along the cliff-top path trodden into the bumpy fields hundreds of years ago by customs officials and smugglers. We climb down from the cliffs.

We’re alone. It’s lunchtime, and everyone else is sitting down to their meals, relishing the pleasures of being alive and the chance to eat such wonderful things as moules marinières, lobster, wrasse, and cod.