It’s an open-ended list. I’ll add to it gradually, whenever I think of something, or someone, cool stuff or more intense stuff. Seeing as I don’t plan to die straight away, I made sure you were nice and fat, my dearest, my precious Book of Wonders. It’s Isa who gave me the idea. She’s on the list. :-)

Sleep well, my little wonders!

Louis

I hadn’t been expecting this. I closed the book and quickly put it on Louis’s desk, as if it might burn my hands. I sat down on the stool facing the desk and continued to stare at it from a distance. Top scorer Antoine Griezmann was giving me a broad, toothy, reassuring smile. After reading the title on the flyleaf, I’d said to myself that Louis was going a bit over the top in describing these guys in shorts who chased after a ball as ‘wonders’. I thought I was going to find the notebook full of pictures of footballers like the ones on the cover. Instead, I had just unearthed a little book of dreams, hidden under my son’s mattress and mentioning a name I’d never heard. Who was this Isa? I felt as if I was intruding. It made me uncomfortable, as if I was entering a secret garden whose gate I’d kicked in. I immediately felt an irrepressible urge to cry, but I knew that my mother was within earshot, and I didn’t want her bursting into Louis’s room. I managed to hold back my tears. I closed the door. I wanted to be on my own.

I sat there for a long while. I was overwhelmed. What should I do? All I wanted to do was to read the rest. Turn the pages, explore Louis’s private world, find out about the things that he most wanted to experience. And, more than anything, to find out whether I was in his Book of Wonders . . . like this Isa, of whom I was instantly jealous. Had my son included me in his fantasy future?