Alice’s clock was digital but she swore she could hear it ticking, counting off the seconds, then the minutes, then the hours. At last, she sat up. She would read, she decided. Only she had no book. Once she’d finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma, she’d never quite gotten around to picking up a replacement. Then she remembered the copy of The Magus, the reading assigned to her by Wolcott, in the library downstairs. She moved from her bed to the door. Hand on the knob, she strained to hear. Nothing, just a dead silent house in the dead middle of night. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door, ran down the staircase and into the library as fast as she could, head lowered so as to avoid contact with any of the many pairs of painted eyes watching her. After pulling the book from the shelf, she ran out of the room, once more past the staring portraits—inside each frame a different face, though really all the same face, all variations of Richard’s face—up the staircase and into her room. She closed the door behind her, turned the lock, and jumped into bed.

As she hauled the book onto her lap, she was almost grateful for its thickness and heft. Even if she read straight through ’til morning, there was no way she’d finish it, be left alone with nothing to do, nothing to occupy her mind but her jittery, fragmented thoughts endlessly chasing their own tails. She fell into the book immediately. Before she knew it, she’d read fifty pages, then a hundred. The young hero, Nicholas, had just completed a miserable week teaching English to schoolboys on the Greek island of Phraxos, was about to return to the magical estate of a wealthy recluse, Maurice Conchis. Alice eagerly flipped the page to return with him when a piece of paper fluttered out of the book, landing on her blanket-covered knee.

Probably a makeshift bookmark, Alice thought, and nearly brushed it to the floor, annoyed at the interruption. Then she noticed that the paper was folded. Curious, she unfolded it.

When Alice saw her name at the top in that handwriting she knew as well as her own, she thought for a second she was in one of those dreams where she couldn’t figure out what was real and what wasn’t. But, no, as improbable, as impossible, as it seemed, this was actually happening. Her brain began working, scrambling to cobble together a reasonable explanation. Yet there were no reasonable explanations to be cobbled, just unreasonable ones: Camilla had either written her a letter before she knew she existed—or Camilla had written her a letter from beyond the grave. Those were the only possibilities that existed, her mind was telling her. And then, there was an instant in which she experienced a flash of understanding: