King Edward, with whom I carried on a proper correspondence for more than two years, heard many of my analogies. The one he seemed to find most entertaining was the one about private tutors and bikes. I mentioned a parent at Sophie and Ethan’s old school who’d hired a private tutor, and he said, “What’s the point in paying to send your kids to private school and then having to pay for a tutor on top of that?” I asked him if he thought it was all right for state-school children to have private tutors and he said yes, that made more sense: if he had children at a state school, he might hire them a tutor if they needed one, but not if they went to a private school. “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “That’s like saying if you have a car that was given to you as a present, it’s OK to buy a bike, but if you’ve paid for your own car, then you mustn’t buy a bike.”

A bizarre analogy, King Edward said. He used those same words. “It’s hilarious, and I’m not criticizing you,” he said, “but why not stick to the relevant subject?” I told him I find it hard to think clearly about certain situations unless I compare them to other similar things. Analogies help me to get my bearings. I said, “If someone smacked me over the head with a hammer, I’d probably say, ‘How would you feel if I hit you in the stomach with a brick? Because that’s just as bad and, in fact, exactly equivalent to what you’ve just done to me!’”

Just as bad . . . What? What alarm bell did those words just ring? Something I know so well that won’t announce its presence in my mind, though I know it’s there, waiting.

He is no less dead . . . A white-cold spark of terror jolts me. Then I go limp, as whatever fear it was that gripped me passes. For a fraction of a second, I knew what those words meant.

I didn’t want to know. I pushed them out of sight. That was the jolt I experienced: my memory trying to toss the evidence away, like a . . .

I stop myself before I come up with another pointless analogy. I use them too often. Gavin—the man who calls himself Gavin—was right to use the plural.

When King Edward finally backed down and admitted I was right about the private-tutor thing, he said, “I surrender. You win. When the war starts, can I be in your unit?” Gavin said the same thing to me in our latest exchange.