I swim up and now I can discern the brightness playing on the surface. My lungs are ready to burst. I need air. I’ll reach the surface any second now. I stretch out my arms, give one last powerful kick with my legs, expending the last of my strength. In a second I’ll be able to take a breath, my fingers are already breaking through the waves . . . and then they hit a glass barrier.

Panic! Desperately I try not to open my mouth, but I still do, I can’t help it, I need air. But I swallow only sea, the sea pours into me.

Help me, Eddie, I beg you!

Eddie

Wilder wants me to be part of his world. He discusses his writing and shows his manuscripts to me. He’s introduced me to his mother, a woman who adores professing her love with gestures as well as words—the latter on their own would be too little. She loves to iron her son’s shirts and cook for him. She tells him how beautiful and polite she thinks I am and showers praise on his most recent book. Certain people can add a touch of love to everything they do, as if they’ve tucked it into a small envelope and quietly slipped it to you with a cheeky grin.

I let him take me along wherever he goes. Sometimes I even forget that I have a life of my own. I bask in his reflected glory and find it intoxicating to accompany him to the kind of get-togethers I’ve always shunned: parties thrown by publishers with five-story headquarters on the Victoria Embankment and offices in New York, Berlin, and New Delhi, and dinners with media-savvy judges and journalists whose opinions fuel nationwide debate—people who live grander, glitzier lives than mine. In their company I can hide away, drink deeply from the cup of life, and find enough distraction that I don’t have time to think of Henri’s inflammation from the catheter or the newest cramp in his instep, and all the manuscripts I don’t read with the necessary care. And Sam, whom I worry about, because he’s growing up far too fast.

I live in two separate worlds—one internal, one external. Outwardly I pretend to listen, put on my “Aha?” face, and nod when I feel it is appropriate to do so. But inside I am with Henri.

In the street I have learned to recognize those people who are caught between two different realities. They look without seeing. They no longer perceive the beauty of the world around them, and, focusing entirely on their sorrow, they are walled up inside themselves. I seek out and hold their gaze and for an instant I forget my shame about my own mask.