I climbed back into my mother’s Mercedes and drove for a while, not quite knowing where I was heading. The visit to Dalanegra had left me disappointed. Perhaps this was a wild-goose chase, but I had to follow the lead to the bitter end. I had to find out the identity of the blurred figure in the photograph.

As I approached Biot, I turned onto the route des Colles, which led to the Sophia Antipolis technology park. Some force was drawing me back to Saint-Ex, where only this morning I had not had the courage to face the ghosts whose existence I had so long denied.

As I drove, I mentally flicked through the photographs I had seen at Dalanegra’s place. One of them had been particularly unsettling, a picture of a genuine ghost: Jean-Christophe Graff, my old French teacher. I blinked, and the memories came flooding back, trailing grief in their wake. Monsieur Graff was the teacher who had guided my reading, fostered my desire to write from the very first. He was kind, astute, and generous. A tall, gangly man with delicate, almost feminine features, he always wore a scarf, even at the height of summer. A teacher capable of extraordinary insight when it came to literature, yet a man who seemed a little lost when it came to reality.

Jean-Christophe Graff had committed suicide in 2002. Fifteen years ago now. To me, he was another victim of the curse of the nice guys—that cruel destiny that crushes people who are a little fragile and whose only mistake is to treat others with kindness. I couldn’t remember who it was who’d claimed that fate metes out to a man only what he can bear, but it’s not true; more often than not, fate is a cruel, twisted fucker that gets off on ruining the lives of the weak and leaves arrogant assholes to lead long and happy lives.

I had been devastated by the news of Graff’s suicide. Before jumping to his death from the balcony of his apartment, he had written to me; the letter arrived in New York a week later. I had never talked about it with anyone. He told me that he felt ill-equipped to deal with life’s cruelties and confessed that loneliness was killing him. He wrote of his distress on discovering that books, which had so often helped him survive the darkest times, no longer seemed enough to keep his head above water. He discreetly mentioned an unrequited love that had broken his heart. In the closing lines, he wished me good luck with my life and told me that he felt sure that I would succeed where he had failed: I would find a soul mate with whom to confront life’s sea of troubles. But he was wrong about me, and often now, in my darkest moments, I thought that it was not inconceivable that I might end my days as he had.