ONE AFTERNOON AFTER SCHOOL I WALKED THROUGH THE door into his room in the hotel. It was empty; G. was shaving in the bathroom. I put my schoolbag on a chair and sat down on the mattress. One of his black notebooks had been casually tossed onto the bed. It was open at the page where G. had scrawled a few lines in his signature turquoise ink: “4:30 p.m. Picked up Nathalie from school. When she caught sight of me on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, her face lit up. Surrounded by all these other young people, she looked as radiant as an angel . . . We spent a delicious, divine time together. She is extraordinarily passionate. I wouldn’t be surprised if this young girl were to end up having a more significant future in these diaries.”

The words detached themselves from the page in a swarm, like a crowd of demons, as my whole world collapsed around me. The furniture in the bedroom became a heap of smoking ruins; cinders floated in the air that I could no longer breathe.

G. came out of the bathroom. He found me in tears, my eyes bloodshot, gesturing in disbelief at the open notebook. He turned pale, then flew into a rage and exploded.

“What? How dare you make a scene! How dare you disturb my work! I’m in the middle of writing a novel! Can you imagine for a moment the pressure I’m under? Can you even remotely conceive of the energy and concentration required? You have no idea what it is to be an artist, a creator! It’s true I don’t have to clock in at a factory every day, but the agony I go through when I am writing, you haven’t the slightest idea what it’s like! What you’ve just read is just the outline of a future novel—it has nothing to do with us, nothing to do with you.”

This lie was the last straw. I might have only just turned fifteen, but I couldn’t help seeing what he said as an insult to my intelligence, a wholehearted rejection of me as a person. This betrayal of all his fine promises, this revelation of his true nature, winded me like a punch in the gut. There was nothing left between us. I’d been cheated, tricked, abandoned to my fate. And I only had myself to blame. I hoisted a leg over the window balustrade and prepared to jump. He pulled me back in at the last moment.

I slammed the door as I left.