Perhaps she’d been all I needed. I suppose that is what any of us need: one single person. But what if that person wasn’t really there? What if it all turned out to be a dream, a chimera, a delusion? I had lost the power to hope, and with it the power to believe. My distrust of others was so great, and so bitter, that I sometimes scared even myself. Everyone I met, I met with hostility. Everyone I encountered, I assumed to be full of malice.
