The day after tomorrow Wilder is traveling to the United States for a reading tour to promote his new book, See You Later. It’s about people who simply walked out of the door and never came back. He searched for people who had been abandoned in this way and listened to their heartrending tales about breaking up and starting all over again.

A professor who slipped out without a word during a family dinner to go and live in the Canadian wilderness. A woman who was going on holiday announced that she needed to go to the toilet as the train entered a station and then simply got off the train instead. A golfer who left the fairway to search for his ball in the trees and just kept on walking away from his former life. A sick little girl who set out one night from the hospital to look for the sea.

I’m relieved that Wilder will be away for a few weeks. I’ll be able to sleep at the Wellington and spend the nights with Henri. At long, long last. I don’t want to miss the moment he comes back, and yet I feel guilty about planning my time with Henri as if he were my secret lover.

DAY FORTY

Sam

Something is different. I notice it as soon as I step out of the lift on the fifth floor. It feels as if disquiet, concern, and frenetic activity have united to create a storm at the end of the corridor. As I get closer I see that three people are attending to Madelyn— Benny, Dmitry, and one of the doctors Dmitry calls the “gas men.”

Nurse Marion is wearing a face mask and casts me a backward glance that suggests, Oh no, not him too. But all she actually says is, “Would you please wait outside, Sam?”

“What’s going on?”

“Please wait outside.”

“What’s wrong with Maddie? What’s wrong with her, Nurse Marion?”

She doesn’t answer, and Dr. Benedicta and Dmitry the Russian nurse attach further machines to Maddie’s body with swift, precise movements. Intravenous catheters are inserted into the backs of her hands and below her collarbone, and catheters and drips are made ready. All of a sudden, like my father, she’s entwined by the machines’ antennae, at the center of a cobweb of total surveillance. One of the machines measuring the oxygen content of her blood is blinking in a way I have never seen my father’s machines do. There’s far too little oxygen in Maddie’s body. Dangerously little.

Her eyes are closed, and she’s pale and sweaty.

“Time since oxygen deterioration?” the doctor asks. I now recognize him as the anesthetist who is often on duty in the intensive care unit to monitor the level of the induced coma.

“Twenty-five minutes,” the nurse replies. “Throat swabs and skin biopsies are under way. Central venous pressure still falling.”