‘It is in our nature to seek truth,’ Michael remarked. ‘That is our beauty.’

Elliot flashed a cynical half-smile.

‘Truth,’ he scoffed. ‘Someone once made me a promise. It wasn’t kept, but if it had been, it would have made lies of all our truths.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

He looked away, troubled. He was a cracked soul, damaged by his past, and it was beyond me or Michael to put him back together. I regretted inviting him up. Broken toys should be left by the side of the road.

‘If I told you, it wouldn’t come true, but it hasn’t come true so I can’t tell you,’ he replied.

‘We didn’t bring you here to talk riddles,’ Michael said. ‘Or muse about the nature of truth. We want you—’

‘Am I being sent down?’ Elliot interrupted, using Oxford’s gentile term to describe an expulsion.

‘Of course not,’ I replied.

‘Are my grades not satisfactory?’ he asked.

‘You know they are,’ I conceded. ‘Satisfactory, good, even, but they could be exceptional.’

‘Then why am I here?’

‘We feel you could be doing so much better,’ I replied. ‘You have a brilliant mind. If you apply it, you could achieve greatness.’

‘You want me to be more beautiful? Is that it? You want a more comprehensive deconstruction of the stars?’ He shook his head.

‘We want you to fulfil your potential,’ Michael said.

‘There’s only one thing I want, and none of you can give it to me,’ Elliot countered. ‘Can I go?’

He got to his feet but waited until I nodded.

Michael and I were silent as we watched him leave, and when he’d gone we discussed him for a while. After thirty minutes we decided to let time and fate take charge and hope Elliot Asha rediscovered his love of the subject. Michael went to his next tutorial, and I leaned across the coffee table and picked up the discarded notepad to see what Elliot had been doodling.

This journal will only be published posthumously to spare me the embarrassment of the confession I’m about to make.

Three years after this encounter, the members of the Swedish Academy awarded me the Nobel Prize in physics for my work on the Hierarchy Problem. It was the defining work of my career. I explained how particles at the electroweak scale are less impacted by gravity than those at the Planck scale.

My confession is this: the work was not mine. At least not entirely. I found the key equations in my notepad. Elliot Asha had written them while we were imploring him to be a better scientist. The truth is, he was above us all and I have never stopped wondering what else he might have discovered if he’d lived an uninterrupted life. His equations weren’t the whole story, but he’d solved all the principles that I later became so famous for. I felt sick with excitement and the guilt of temptation, and agonized over what to do. I knew that notepad contained riches and glory that weren’t mine, but I’m ashamed to say I listened to temptation.