There was no hostility in his voice, only indifference. His calmness upset me. I lay on my back, staring blankly at the ceiling; in the distance, the lake was pounding the shore with the throb of an engine. Was Lewis speaking the truth? Was I the guilty one? Yes, without any doubt, I was guilty - not so much for having begged his caresses but rather for having deluded myself with false hopes. Certainly, Lewis's conscience wasn't perfectly clear, which accounted for his temperamental behaviour. But for a man such as he, there's very little distance between a refusal to love and an absence of love. He had deliberately decided to stop loving me. The result was that he no longer loved me. The past was unmistakably dead - a death without a corpse, like Diego's. That's what made it so difficult to believe. It would really have helped if I'd had a tombstone to weep over.