The Hostile Hospital (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #8)

by Lemony Snicket

And I would hop like nobody has ever hopped before, if I could somehow go back to that terrible Thursday, and stop Beatrice from attending that afternoon tea where she met Esmé Squalor for the first time.

“Because of the evidence discussed on page nine,” read the sentence above the photograph, “experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor’s whereabouts are unknown.”

I am alone this evening, and I am alone because of a cruel twist of fate, a phrase which here means that nothing has happened the way I thought it would. Once I was a content man, with a comfortable home, a successful career, a person I loved very much, and an extremely reliable typewriter, but all of those things have been taken away from me, and now the only trace I have of those happy days is the tattoo on my left ankle.