The first thing Claire Winslow ever said to Tom Ricci was not what he expected.

He had been sitting in the long island salon for an hour, reading a novel he wasn't absorbing, waiting for the Winslow family's doctor to finish his consultation with Claire. When the doctor left—shaking his head in that particular way that doctors shake their heads when they have run out of things to recommend—Claire turned from the window and spoke without turning to look at him.

"Everyone says you barely sleep at all."

Tom set down his novel. This was not the greeting he had anticipated. His recommendation had come from a literary contact at the publishing house where he worked as a proofreader—a man who had heard that Edgar Winslow was looking for "someone who could keep his daughter occupied during her waking hours." Tom had assumed this meant playing cards, or walking, or some other benign activity that didn't require a medical degree.

He stood up. "That's what everyone says. But they're usually wrong."

Claire turned then. She was twenty years old, with the kind of pale beauty that comes from spending most of your life indoors—which, given her condition, was literally true. Her hair was pulled back in a severe bun, and she was wearing a dressing gown that had once belonged to someone else, probably her mother. In front of her on the low table was a copy of The Odyssey, open to the same page Tom could see from the corner of his eye.

"I've read this three times," she said. "When I can't sleep, I read. When I can't read, I sleep. It's not a very good system."

Tom, who had dropped out of NYU after two years because his family couldn't afford it but who had spent every spare moment in the New York Public Library reading everything he could find, said: "Homer's not a great bedtime book."

"I'm not sleeping."

"Right." He hesitated, then did something he would later tell himself was either very brave or very foolish. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a pencil and a small pad of stationery, and on the first blank page, wrote a single sentence.

He showed it to her.

"The ship was already gone when Odysseus woke up, but the sea was still warm from where it had carried him."

Claire read it. She read it twice. Then she said, very quietly: "What happens next?"

"That," Tom said, "depends on how long you're awake tomorrow."

That became the arrangement. Every evening, at eight o'clock, Tom would sit in the Winslow salon—later, in Claire's drawing room, because the family had decided the salon was too formal—and read to her. Not Homer. Not anything printed. The stories Tom made up himself, on the spot, about a sailor named Odysseus who was trying to get home but kept getting distracted by things he had never seen before.

Each night, the story changed. Tom added new islands, new characters, new obstacles. Some nights Odysseus found a city made entirely of glass. Other nights he met a woman who could see the future but couldn't change it. And each night, Claire woke a little earlier and stayed awake a little longer, because she wanted to know what happened next.

Not because Tom's stories were good—they were decent, at best. Tom knew this. He knew his plots were predictable and his dialogue was stiff and his endings were always a little rushed because he was running out of paper and time. But they were hers. He was writing them for her, and that made them something more than words on a page.

By December 1924, Claire was awake for eight, sometimes nine hours a day. It wasn't a cure. The ferry disaster of 1918 was still there, underneath everything—the cold water, the screaming, the feeling of the deck tilting beneath her feet like the earth itself was betraying her. But the stories had given her something the water hadn't: a reason to stay above the surface.

Then came April 1925, and the death of Claire's grandmother. Agnes Winslow's mother died of pneumonia in Manhattan, and the funeral brought the entire Winslow family together under one roof for the first time in years. Edgar, who had been in Chicago. Agnes, who had barely left her room since the ferry incident. And Claire, who for three days did not wake at all.

Tom was called to her bedside. The doctor said it was the grief. Tom knew it was something else—he had heard, in the hour before she slipped into this deeper sleep, that she was murmuring something. A name. A character from his story, one he had created only the night before.

He sat beside her bed and read. He read all night, his voice low and steady, the candle burning down to a puddle of wax on the table beside him. At dawn, Claire's eyes opened.

"What happened?" she whispered. "Did the sailor find the island?"

"He did," Tom said. "But it wasn't what he expected."

She closed her eyes again, but this time she was smiling.

A year later, Tom's first short story was published in The New Yorker. He mailed a copy to Claire on a Tuesday morning in May. Inside, on the title page, he had written: "For Claire—the best of all the reasons worth waking for."

Claire read it on the long island balcony, where the sea breeze lifted her hair and the water below was exactly the colour of the sea in his story. She was awake. Not cured. Not fixed. But awake, and reading, and for the first time since the ferry, the water didn't feel cold.

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Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: