There is a morning, much later, when the writing turns a corner.

Mine was a Tuesday in January. I woke up at five-forty without an alarm, which has become the new thing my body does. I made coffee. I sat down at a desk. I had a chapter to write. The outline was clear. I knew exactly what to write. I knew it well enough that the writing would have taken about three hours.

I did not write that chapter.

I opened a new file with no title and wrote a sentence I had not planned to write. I wrote I lied to you.

I will tell you, since I am still inside the Interlude and the Epilogue has not yet happened, what I meant by that sentence. I had been writing the book in the voice of a person who had survived. I had been doing this on purpose. I did not believe I had survived. I believed that if I wrote it as if I had, I would catch up to my own writing. I would walk into the voice the way an actor walks into a part. I would become the person the chapters described.

This had worked, partly. The chapters were better than I was. The reader, by Chapter Eleven, had access to a more recovered version of me than the one writing the chapters at five-forty in the morning. I wanted that. I wanted you to be reading something better than what I was producing, because you needed the better thing more than I needed the credit for it.

What I realized, with the cursor blinking after I lied to you, was that the pretending I had been doing for years had a price the book itself was going to charge.

The price was that the last chapter had to drop the pretense.

I am about to walk you, in the chapters that follow, through the Return, through the part of the journey where someone who was lost comes home changed, and learns, slowly, to be of use to others who are still lost. The reason I wanted to put this Interlude here, just before that Part begins, is that I wanted you to know, now, before you get to the Epilogue, that the recovered voice you have been reading was not always present in the writing of it. It is going to be present when you read the Epilogue. I am not lying about that. The voice is real. It is just the voice the chapters built, by being written.

Welcome to the part of the book where the writer and the chapters finally meet.