“Of all the things that happened there, in that place full of enemies and dust and spies and sadness; of all the things Margot said to me—the calculations that sounded like friendship, the casual shattering of my life—out of all those things, I am grateful for only one: that I never loved her. If I had loved her I couldn’t bear any of it, and so I am grateful for this lack of love, this one remaining thing I can bear. Because even if it’s a terrible thing to have, if I didn’t have that, I’d have nothing.


If Haruko said that, she was lying.
She did love me. I loved her too.”