IF MELISSA AND LEE hadn’t decided to fall in love, if Melissa hadn’t told me she didn’t want me to tell her my secrets anymore, I would never have looked at the Intimate Links website. I looked—there, and on Craigslist, and Forbidden Fruit, and several other similar websites—because I felt as if something important had been ripped out of my life. I wanted a replacement for the person who’d been my best friend since the first day of secondary school—someone I could confide in no matter what stupid thing I’d done. I’d never heard of any New Best Friend websites, but I knew there were sites for those seeking new lovers, and I soon found plenty of them. I chose Intimate Links because, aesthetically, it was my favorite. It had a better look than the other sites.

I called my advert “I Want a Secret.” I wrote it quickly, off the cuff, and posted it not really expecting any decent replies. Indecent ones flooded in, from people who couldn’t spell and seemed incapable of writing more than a line or two. I deleted them all. Then, after about four days, I got a reply that sparked my interest, from a man calling himself King Edward VII. We began a correspondence, and within a week I was completely hooked on him. By email we discussed all kinds of things: our mutual love of secrecy—we talked about that a lot, and the possible reasons for it. We listed our favorite everything: books, films, songs, animals, cities, countries, wine, color, words, food. Then we moved on to our least favorite.

Once, we spent days going back and forth on the subject of Clark Kent and Superman. King Edward asked me, out of the blue, whether Superman was always still Clark Kent on some level, even while in Superman mode, or whether he completely ceased to be Clark Kent when he became Superman. I was firmly of the view that he never entirely lost his Clark Kent identity, even with his magic cape on, and King Edward drew all sorts of far-fetched conclusions about my character from this one opinion.