I’m like a yo-yo, up and down… sometimes I actually do get flashes of some kind of happy ending, for like a second! I drift off into daydreams, and… and I can’t help thinking: what if…Albert died? You’d totally! yeah, she’d totally — and then I go chasing that fantasy ’til it leads me to cliff-edges and I back away, shuddering…

When I head out now along the road I drove up that first time, when I went to pick Lotte up for the dance… it was all so different! It’s all gone, all of it! Not a trace of the world the way it was back then, not a heartbeat of my feelings from before… I feel like a ghost coming back to the burned-out rotting mansion he built in the prime of his life, decked out with everything money could buy, and left, as he died, to his beloved son, with such high hopes…