She wasn’t lying even when she said, ‘Nobody else. Ever again.’ There are contradictions in time, that’s all, that don’t exist on the mathematical point. She had so much more capacity for love than I had—I couldn’t bring down that curtain round the moment, I couldn’t forget and I couldn’t not fear. Even in the moment of love, I was like a police officer gathering evidence of a crime that hadn’t yet been committed, and when more than seven years later I opened Parkis’s letter the evidence was all there in my memory to add to my bitterness.
