I became discontented before King Edward did. In July 2011, after I’d known him just over a year and with only his emails and my fantasies to represent his presence in my life, I started to crave real-world physical contact with him, and I told him so. I was scared things might start to become a little less urgent and exciting between us if we didn’t take them to the next level soon. King Edward said he felt the same, but that, having seen a photo of me and knowing how stunning I was, he’d be too scared of rejection to meet me in person. He said he wasn’t anywhere near as good-looking for a man as I was for a woman. I told him, truthfully, that I honestly couldn’t care less what he looked like. I’ve never fancied men for their looks—it’s always their attitudes, and personalities, and I knew I loved King Edward’s. To me, the idea of me rejecting him in person was unthinkable, to the point where I couldn’t quite understand why he was so worried about it.

I asked if we could maybe speak on the phone. He said no; he didn’t want me to hear his voice. He didn’t like his voice, he said.

One day, an anonymous parcel arrived for me. It was a copy of what he’d told me was his favorite book—Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. In it he’d written, “For Nicki—we must have naked lunch together one day. KE7 x.” I was touched but scared. I told him not to send anything to the house again. He never did.

The lack of real-world physical contact wasn’t the only thing that bothered me; I was starting to feel that a weird inequality was undermining our closeness. King Edward knew almost everything about me, past and present, but he didn’t seem nearly so willing to discuss himself and his life or past. He would write at length about his feelings and his ideas—so it wasn’t as if he was ungenerously refusing to share himself with me—but I started to have this sense of him as a soul that was kind of detached from any sort of reality. He revealed the bare-minimum details about his life, whereas he knew almost as much about mine as I did.