The fine threads that constitute my invisible feelers are searching, revealing for the first time the dimensions of the room around me. It is large. No ordinary room. This room is filled with sighs—continual sighing as if people are letting go of things and people and times. And life. My mind goes back to a door—a door on an island—and to the kindly face of a woman embracing a girl underwater. Then I hear the child weeping. The child on the rock. Madelyn.

That’s her name? How do I know that?

Other things occur to me, as if chestnuts were raining down from an invisible tree onto the ground before me.

Scott wants to study psychology, specializing in psychosis. Who’s Scott?

Madame Lupion has a squint and a kitchen crammed with handwritten recipe books, including one for tarte tatin, which you bake facedown with caramel in a special flat pan. I’ve no idea who Madame Lupion is, but my grandfather Malo had one of those pans for making tarte tatin.

Greg was here and so were Monica and Ibrahim, who has a tattoo and says he’s going to go to work for Amnesty International as a human rights lawyer.

I have the impression that I’m leafing through a book I didn’t know I wrote. I also notice that something else is different on the other side of the barrier. The light has a different quality, quieter and more sheltered. My chest hardens into a rock with a heart of stone beating inside it. I’m alone. Completely alone! I panic, I want to scream, I want . . .

“Calm down, Mr. Skinner,” a woman’s voice says. “Everything’s fine. Nurse Marion’s with you. Shush, everything’s all right. The stars are breathing and so are you. Nothing bad can happen to you. You’re safe here.”

Nurse Marion? I cannot see the woman with the vaguely familiar, croaky voice, which smells of cigarettes. It’s a welcoming aroma, like coming home. Soon my heart is beating more calmly, no longer flapping frenziedly like a bird in stormy waters, no longer begging so urgently to be heard.

“Hello, Henri Skinner,” the voice says softly.

“Hello,” I answer. Can she hear me?

“Mr. Skinner, every night I analyze your sleep architecture. I’m certain you’re awake, but you can’t express yourself.”

Yes, yes! A gentle coolness floods my veins, and my fierce, black pain subsides, burning me less, no more than a flickering candle flame now.

“It’s almost half past three,” Nurse Marion tells me, and the scent of smoke reminds me of childhood nights by the fireside. Central heating came late to our village by the sea, and every house was heated with firewood in winter, its fragrance only fading when warmth arrived with the summer breeze at the end of spring.

The voice says something else: “Madelyn, my dear.”

I think, Madelyn, are you there?