“Making notes,” she’d reply, shutting the book and putting it away. They were small, the standard little notebooks the Workers had produced and which we continued to produce now with rather more effort. They had buff covers and were sewn together. I had never realized how many of them she had. I counted—twelve. If they were full and each held five thousand words, which would be about right, that was sixty thousand words she had written. I expected them to be notes, perhaps dialogues. They had her name on the covers, and under that they were numbered with Roman numerals. I wasn’t sure how to read them—whether to glut myself on them all at once, or to save them. They represented something more of Simmea, which I had not expected. I was excited, and at the same time afraid of disappointment. I picked up the one labeled as number I and opened it and read.

“I was born in Amasta, a farming village near Alexandria, but I grew up in the Just City. My parents called me Lucia, after the saint, but Ficino renamed me Simmea, after the philosopher. Saint Lucy and Simmias of Thebes aid and defend me now!”

Whatever I had expected this was not it. I read the paragraph again. I had never known that her birth name was Lucia, nor guessed that she would have called on Saint Lucy. How little I had known her after all! But this was treasure, an autobiography. Many people in the city wrote one; there was a kind of fashion for them. Simmea had never told me she was writing one. I felt a little hurt, and yet still excited. She would be bound to talk about me. I could see our relationship from her perspective. It was the closest I could come now to talking to her. And yet I hesitated. Lucia, Saint Lucy—what if reading this proved I didn’t know her after all? What if she didn’t love me? But I knew she had. It was unquestionable. She had said once that she loved me like stones fall downward. I wanted to read her annals of our life together. I wouldn’t be able to show it to anyone except our Young Ones, because she was sure to have revealed that I was Apollo. How well I remembered her discovering it, that day in the Temple of Asklepius. How angry she had made Athene! What terrible consequences that had had! And it was all my fault. Yet even so, even in all its consequences that included the metamorphosis of Sokrates and the collapse of the First Republic, I still smiled to remember how well she had dealt with discovering who I was.