Giulio awoke on New Year’s Day with a screaming headache.
Fabienne’s final coup de grace caught him unawares, and his
embrace of a bottle of Scotch during the next hours was his
clumsy attempt at self-medication. As in previous years, he
had anticipated the New Year’s Eve call with patience. For
several days prior, he would play out small scripts of dialogue
in his mind. Sometimes he would even write out or diagram what
he imagined would be the most likely variants of the conversation.

His imagination of how Fabienne would respond to him created a
garden of forking paths in his mind. Yet in his delusional state,
he never perceived that the paths that might lead to a sorry end
for him. Nonetheless, many paths did lead to a muddle in which
any suggestion of meeting Fabienne would be most inappropriate.
In that case, he would try script-writing again, this time
with a different lead-in.


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