“I’m writing about drug barons in Myanmar, who categorize the world into the poor, the rich, and addicts. I’m going to meet a woman who lends her uterus to other couples and divides the world into guilty and not guilty. The couple bear no guilt for their childlessness, but this allows her to make up for the guilt she believes she bears from a previous life. I’ve spoken to an eleven-year-old prodigy called Jack who’s already a better musician than Coltrane or Cincotti. Jack says that when you love something you must practice, and when you’re good at something you must practice even harder. What else are our long lives for? Those are the little fellow’s precise words. Just goes to show that he’s smarter than any of us.”

That’s what Henri told me the last time we talked. He’d arrived in London so stressed and so desperate that I felt like screaming, “What’s the bloody use of all this? Let’s be together. I love you so much. I love you, everything about you. Let’s be together for this life and every other. I can never get enough of you.”

He told me about dozens and dozens of people, and yet he never mentioned his son, Sam.

I spin the globe. It rotates only briefly, and yet those revolutions catapult me back two years into the past.

“I’m writing and traveling, drinking and trying to keep the nights at bay. Dawn is my foe. In Iceland I meet Etienne, a Canadian ocean cartographer who’s settled in Iceland and sees the world as most people will never see it—as the blue planet, whose principal feature is water, not land. Reality is flux,” Henri says, running his finger along the coastlines on the magnificent globe. “The areas we’ve explored are far smaller than those we know nothing about. In other words, we can see the world, but we don’t know it. We are dwarfed by reality.”

I quote this last sentence to Sam. He nods, and I see the question form on his face: What about me? Did he talk about me?

“Your teas are ready!” calls Emma.

Sam carries the tray as I push the BMW into the courtyard. We take the lift up to the publishing offices. It used to be the goods lift, and it’s decorated with painted tulip leaves, flowers, and bulbs. It stops at the fourth floor, where Ralph, Andrea, and Poppy work. From here a spiral staircase leads up to my flat.