‘I’ll be off, then,’ said the Prince.

‘Shall I give George a message?’

‘Tell him it wasn’t his fault. We make our own lives.’

I did not want to let the Prince leave. George had seemed upset about the damage he had caused to his son, and it would be good for him to hear directly that it was not his fault. But there was no obvious way I could keep the Prince in the building without remaining there myself or violating security.

‘I recommend you return later.’

‘Thanks. I might do that.’

I knew with absolute certainty that the Prince was lying and would not return. It was an odd feeling to be so sure of something for which I was unable to cite concrete evidence. There must have been some information that I had subconsciously processed. I was still trying to work out what it was when I knocked on the door of my own apartment.

Rosie opened it, looking incredibly beautiful. She was wearing makeup and freshly applied perfume, and a tight dress that adhered to her new shape. Gene was standing behind her.

She smiled. ‘Hi Don, what are you doing here? I thought Gene was taking me to dinner.’ She smiled again.

‘He is,’ I said. ‘I just needed to check the beer. But there’s no sign of flooding. Inspection complete.’

I ran back to the elevator, pushing my foot into the crack before the door closed. Gene followed me.

‘What the hell, Don? Where are you going?’

‘It’s an emergency. I’m unavailable. Rosie was expecting you to take her out. The change is transparent to her.’

‘I’m not taking Rosie to Momofuku Ko.’

There was no time to argue.

At the ground level I looked up and down the street and saw him, standing on the street waving for a taxi. I started running as one pulled over and arrived just in time to drag him away from the opened door. The driver was not happy with my intervention, and I ended up with my arms around the Prince as he drove away.

‘What the hell?’ said the Prince, expressing his surprise in the same words as Gene.

‘I’m going to buy you dinner,’ I said. ‘At Momofuku Ko. World’s Best Restaurant. While we wait for your father to return.’

I had made the connection just as Rosie opened the door and startled me with her beauty. A wave of pain had run over me, a realisation that I was going to lose her, and a consequent feeling that life would not be worth living. It was an extreme emotion and an irrational conclusion, and both would have passed, as they had passed in my twenties, when I had looked into the pit of depression and managed to step back. That was what I had recognised in the Prince. He was at the edge of the pit. He had said he would not be around after tomorrow.

I was trusting my least reliable skills when I decided to follow him. It was possible I was losing the last chance to save my marriage. I was sure that Rosie or Gene would have told me I had got it wrong. But the risk associated with an error was too great.

I released the Prince.

‘You’re going to have to explain before you take me anywhere,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’ll explain as we walk. Our first priority is to catch the subway. Reservations are forfeited fifteen minutes after the scheduled arrival time.’

I was trying to think of a way of discovering if my depression hypothesis was correct without asking the question directly. I tried to recover the mindset I had in the bad times to work out what sort of question might have elicited an honest response. It was not pleasant.

‘Are you okay?’ said the Prince.

‘Revisiting some bad memories,’ I said. ‘I was once so depressed I considered suicide.’

‘Tell me about it,’ he said.

I texted Gene to say I would be using the booking, in case he changed his mind about going with Rosie. The Prince and I arrived twelve minutes late, three minutes inside the tolerance limit. I would have preferred to be dining with Rosie, but there would have been the problem of what to say. Despite Sonia’s encouragement, I still had no solution to the Marriage Problem.

But dinner with the Prince was fascinating.

‘George told me he convinced you to take drugs which ultimately resulted in you becoming an addict.’

‘He told you that?’

‘Correct.’

‘Fair play to him. I suppose I can tell you the whole story then.’

The waiter came to take our drinks orders. The Prince ordered a beer. Apparently his recovery program allowed alcohol, so I recommended sake as more compatible with the food. I ordered a club soda for myself.

‘Basically, Dad was doing the whole rock’n’roll thing, and I was the opposite. Except for the drumming. No artificial stimulants for me.’ The Prince used a non-standard intonation for the last sentence, as though he was impersonating a cartoon superhero. ‘But I meant it. And he said, “You can’t go through life without ever getting just a little bit high. Without knowing what it’s like.” And I was such a geek—you know what I’m saying—that I decided if I was going to have one experience, it’d be the best one I could have.’

‘You researched drugs?’

‘I know, it seems crazy.’

It seemed completely sensible. I wondered why I had fallen into drinking alcohol and caffeine without proper research into alternatives—or indeed into the impacts of these two. They were legal, but so were cigarettes. Legality was surely less important than the risk of death. The exception had been amphetamines, which I saw as having a precise, focused purpose. I explained my own experiment as a student, and the exam disaster that resulted.