I cried Henri’s name. I know it from the sensation in my mouth. It’s as if I can still feel him. The warmth his lips have left on mine, their pressure and his breath. He was always so warm, like an oven or a fire. Certain stones are also capable of storing up the heat of millennia.

The images from my dream fade, leaving an abrupt feeling that he was torn from me and washed away.

What a ridiculous thought!

This is the real world, where Henri is lying in a coma, contracting repeated bouts of pneumonia that are carrying him farther from life and closer to death. Closer to the edge of this disc world.

Fear haunts me now, and yet I try to hide it from Wilder. I know that I’m in the process of destroying our future together, but I cannot do anything about it. Or rather: I do not want to do anything about it.

In the real world, I live with a man who doesn’t know that I have visited Henri every day for almost five weeks now. I barely know how each new day is going to turn out. I’m filled with an intense and malignant sensation of having lost something vital, so vital that no laughter or beautiful place or new day means anything anymore. Infinite grief has taken hold of my chest, my stomach, and my neck. A blackness has engulfed me, and I am drowning in a great, dark, deep lake.

Is Henri dead?

I listen out for Wilder’s breathing, but he’s lying quietly beside me in bed, one of his legs on top of mine. I bite my fist to stifle the sobs. I push Wilder’s leg off mine as carefully as I can and get up.

The pain is more piercing than last time, when for months I didn’t know how I would survive if I couldn’t see Henri again, touch him, talk to him, see his smile, and feel his eyes and his hands on my skin. If I no longer felt loved. To be lovesick is to die, leaving only a husk of oneself in suspended animation.

I walk across the waxed wooden floorboards in my bare feet. I take a large mug, hold it under the tap to fill it, and then greedily drink the cold water. It tastes of the salt that was on Henri’s lips when he kissed me just now.

My husband is dead.

I don’t have the faintest idea why that word came into my mind. Henri isn’t my husband.

It stems from that extraordinarily intense dream. We were married, and everything was different. The chapel with the red door stood on a grassy cliff above the sea. Samson was the sea chapel’s patron saint. We promised to meet there if we ever lost contact. That was the deal.