I know there’s a wonderful place beyond that door. There, nothing will ever end. We’ll know all the joys of this world. I will now pass through that door, and it will close behind me. Finally, I will be with my father and my grandfather again. The two poles that hold my world together, my up and my down, my breath and my pulse, my moon and my sea. My day and my night.

Come back! two voices whisper inside my head.

I ignore them. I quicken my pace. Beyond that door lies Ty Kerk, Malo’s house between the stars and the sea. On nights when the raging Iroise hurled its waters against the cliffs and the waves leaped higher and higher, the two-hundred-year-old granite house would wheeze and creak like a ship on heavy seas, but it always resisted.

My father smiles and walks through the door.

Grandpa Malo will be sitting at the small wooden table by the fireplace, reading, and intermittently quoting, poetry or Proust. My father, Yvan, is bound to be making something in the far corner of the room: driftwood picture frames or a lamp whose shade is made of Breton drinking bowls, with a gnarled walnut tree stump for the base. My father will be mocking Grandpa’s quotations or saying nothing, absorbed in converting an object into something different. My father understands things but has never understood people.

The door opens, inviting me in. Everything will be consigned to the past—all hardship, all torment, fear, pain, sadness, longing, all humiliation and anxiety, all . . .

Eddie’s smile. The way she observes me when she thinks I’m still asleep and I appear not to notice that she’s looking at me. Eddie, love of my unlived life, mother of my unborn children.

“Henri?” my father asks kindly, poking out his head from behind the blue door. “Are you coming?”

Come back! whispers the mild breeze, whose caress I suddenly feel on my skin. It’s coming from somewhere, from the landless sea, the same sea under whose gray-glass surface figures are floating upright with open eyes, as if they are asleep and dreaming and don’t realize where they are.

Back—back to where?

I stop and listen out.

Sam. His little thumb tucked into his fist while he slept.

A gust of wind pushes the door farther open, just a touch. Isn’t that the fireplace? Can’t I hear Grandpa Malo too, reading under his breath a marvailhoù, one of the old, occult Breton stories about the in-between world? Maybe he’s just reading my story. Maybe we’re all stories that someone is reading, and maybe that will save us before we ultimately expire?

A momentary recollection of the Eternal Reader, a monk in the mountains on the border between Austria and Italy, who read all day every day, from dawn to dusk, because he wanted to keep the people in the stories alive.