I explained that I needed him to use his phone to take photos of the notes Alexis Clément had scribbled in the margins of my essays and text the pictures to me. It was a two-minute job for most people, but it took my father at least fifteen, punctuated by caustic comments. He was so furious by the time he finished that he ended the conversation by saying, “You’re forty-two years old, for God’s sake. Don’t you have anything better to do than trawl through memories of your school days? Is that the sum total of your life? Stirring up the past and annoying the shit out of the rest of us?”

“Thanks, Dad. See you later.”

I opened up the pictures of Alexis Clément’s notes. Like many pretentious writers, he liked nothing more than his own words, but it was not his philosophical musings I was interested in; it was his handwriting. I zoomed in. It was sloppy—not a spidery scrawl, more like a doctor’s writing on a prescription. You had to pause every now and then over a word or phrase.

As I studied the pictures, my heart began to race. I compared them with the letters Vinca had received and the dedication in the book of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva. Before long, there was no doubt in my mind. While the letters and the dedication were written by the same hand, they were absolutely nothing like Alexis Clément’s notes on my philosophy essays.

2.

I could feel my whole body trembling. Vinca’s lover had not been Alexis Clément. There was another man, another Alexis. Probably the blurred figure with his back to the camera in the photographs; that was the man she ran away with that Sunday morning in December. Alexis forced me. I didn’t want to sleep with him! Vinca’s words were right, but my interpretation had been wrong. Because of a cropped photograph and some rumors spread by classmates, everyone had assumed that Vinca had had an affair with a man who had never been her lover.