Lie With Me: A Novel

by Philippe Besson

I also dread the cruelty of reality. We were eighteen—now we are forty. We are no longer who we once were. Time has passed, life has rolled over us and transformed us. We will not recognize one another. It doesn’t matter how well appearances have been preserved, it’s who we are, at the root. He is a married father who takes care of a farm in Charente. I am a novelist who spends six months of the year abroad. How could the circles of these two existences have even one point of intersection? Above all, we will no longer find the thing that first pushed us toward one another that day. That singular moment. The pure urgency of it. There were circumstances—a series of coincidences and simultaneous desire. There was something in the atmosphere, something in the time and the place, that brought us together. And then everything broke—like a firework exploding on a dark night in July that spirals out in all directions, blazing brightly, dying before it touches the ground, so that no one gets burned. No one gets hurt.