He tried not to have any expectations. Nothing would look quite the same. Things would seem smaller, houses and gardens would have been changed – converted, extended, knocked down… He was trying not to have any expectations, but colourful memories of his childhood in Marigold Street kept surfacing in him and he couldn’t help feeling nostalgic. It felt good, but it was heavy, too. Like carrying a tired child.

He only had to cross the vacant lot at this end of the street and he’d be there. This strange, empty space was the size of a town square, and, as he remembered, there was nothing on it but dust, scrub, and a few flowers from the random seeds the wind had scattered there. The place didn’t even have a name, so they had just referred to it as ‘the vacant lot’. It was a place with neither function nor beauty, abandoned by both nature and man.

The smell of coffee filled the room. There was a pool of the black liquid spilled on the beautiful stone floor of the dining hall and in it, the broken pieces of the coffee cup. Next to it, Mrs Whitmarsh was lying on the floor, motionless.

The coffee cup was a most delicate antique piece, made of the finest porcelain, painted with indigo blue and golden. It was Mrs Whitmarsh’s favourite cup – or it used to be. She cherished it, for a very special reason. The coffee cup was 216 years old and the event that brought about its end was no ordinary event.

The neon light on the white walls. The noise. The crowd. The heat. I hate this. It feels like being in a fish tank. My head feels like a fish tank, too. It is already well past midday and I wanted to get to my grandmother’s in Zolsano around lunchtime… I haven’t seen her for more than twenty years. And she’s expecting me.

The One? Am I really thinking this? The idea of ‘the one’ is stupid. I’ve discussed this with myself a million times! When we‘re in love, and we think that our love is ‘the one’, we think that there’s only one person who we can be happy with: the one that we love! But how many times have I been in love? I’ve fallen in love at least ten times already! Ten! The one? Nonsense! The ten? Ridiculous. Yes, it’s mathematically impossible that out of 3.5 billion people of the opposite sex on this planet there is only one who is suitable for us. So the feeling we get when we’re in love is false. That’s disillusioning, but true.

As Professor Blake Burrows stopped his car in the driveway, he saw what is a typical scene in Ann Arbor: residential houses bordering a park with paths through it, a basketball court and a corner store. The professor – whom, with all due respect, we will simply call Blake – was not a very domestic type, but he was certainlylooking forward to seeing the new home that the University of Michigan had found for him here. The small, two-bedroom detached house seemed modest, traditional and peaceful from the outside, with its red brick walls and white doors and windows. Blake got out of the car, took a deep breath and walked up the five white stone steps leading to the doorway, also framed in white stone. He didn’t understand why, but his heart started beating as he turned the key. This was not the heartbeat of joyful excitement. Something’s a little odd here.