Of course, the past was – and always would be – present, but now Edgar was looking to the future. And what he saw was beautiful.

*

While he talked, I cried relentlessly. Their story was devastating. Heartbreaking.

Isadora, Charlotte and Edgar were survivors. I understood now what made the three of them so radiant: their smiles were genuine.

It was such a powerful message of hope for me . . . After every nightmare, a new day dawns. I’d been waiting for the dawn since Louis’s accident, but I realized that I had to keep moving forward in the dark, that it was still possible to carve out a path, no matter how dense the blackness.

The second bottle of wine was empty. Once again, I asked Edgar why he’d told me all this. Nowadays, he said, he listened to his heart. It was the only thing he trusted. His heart had told him to talk to me, to tell me everything. To be able to open doors, you have to know what is concealed in the dark and not be afraid of it. Edgar knew that my doors would remain closed, that I wasn’t yet ready to speak, and, in any case, he wasn’t asking me to. I would talk later. Edgar’s heart was never wrong. His heart had known, the first time he saw me. From the first moment, in that jam-packed apartment.

I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable. He was talking to me as if we were a couple. I said as much, and he answered that he was aware of it, of course, that it was obvious. I suddenly felt very hot. Other confused feelings mingled with my embarrassment. An inappropriate sense of elation. An intoxication hidden beneath layers of a cracked veneer.

I arrived home at around three o’clock in the morning. Unable to get to sleep, I went into the room where my mother slept. I leaned over her and whispered that I loved her.

Half asleep, she said, ‘What are you doing here, pussycat?’ and threw her soft bony arms around me.

It was exactly what I needed.

18

9 to 6 Days

Rainbow Colours

The next stage of the precious notebook was to go to Budapest, and what Louis had concocted for me to do there was no cakewalk, as my mother put it.

The main challenge was to take part in a race called The Color Run, which claims to be ‘where sport meets fun’. Mum did a Web search and made me watch a video that said it all: thousands of people in white T-shirts and protective goggles having clouds of coloured paint thrown in their faces for every kilometre they completed, ending up a total mess, naturally. I couldn’t see the fun in that, but the runners looked happy.

‘A bunch of drug addicts, probably . . .’ Mum remarked, before learning that these masochistic urban communions had already attracted several million people around the globe.