When I was at last alone in my hotel room, I sank to the floor on my knees, then pressed my forehead to the rug, the way Muslims pray, and I let myself know my emptiness and then let the sorrow of my losses fill that emptiness, and I began to weep. There was a knock at the door. I ignored it. It came several times more, then I heard Allison say, “If you don’t let me in, I’ll tell the concierge there’s something wrong and make him open the door.”

I rose and let her in. She looked at me, and I said, “It’s an ugly thing to watch old men cry.”

“Why don’t you see your daughter?”

“You mean why won’t she see me?”

“I guess.”

“She blamed me…blames me…for it all. She’s the sort of person who believes in psychosomatic illness. That a husband’s sins create a wife’s cancer.”

“What were your sins?”

“The ones she knows about? That are involved in this…alienation. They’re that I did things that were too dangerous. Risky. That caused stress. The thing is that she encouraged it, my wife did. Like the events that Franz and Lukas were talking about. I tried to walk away…I was a new father…It changed me…it did…I wanted to be careful. Stay out of things that were none of my business. But Marie-Laure she said she wanted me to be the man she’d met and fallen in love with and wanted to be with…every time I said this is getting crazy…she said I had to go on.”

“But can’t you explain?”

“Then our son…he wanted…this is my daughter’s vision of it…he wanted to be like me. Daring. But also, moral and doing good things. Better than me. Which is how it should be. I wanted that. Approved of it. That’s what drove him. To his death. Add that, and that was the pain that became physical, you see, in his mother, the pain of that, and so, for my daughter, it’s me that killed both her brother and her mother.”

“That doesn’t sound right or fair.”

“You’re hearing it from me. I’m sure I’m soft-peddling it. Taking the worst of the ugliness out of it. Maybe if you heard it from her, it would be different.”

Allison looked at me. Maybe it was with pity. Maybe with sadness. She started to move closer to me, not just physical distance, searching for a role through which she might offer comfort and solace.