Summary

In Chapter XX, Li recalls her friend Katherine asking if James’s suicide had been caused by Vincent’s: whether Vincent’s actions had given James a sense of possibility he would not otherwise have had. Further to this, Li wonders how much her own suicide attempt in 2012 contributed to Vincent’s suicide. Li’s friends Deborah and Brigid discuss the assisted suicide of their colleague the writer John L’Heureux, who chose to die at the age of eighty-four due to Parkinson’s disease. Li wonders whether James’s death could be compared to L’Heureux’s. Li speculates that James committed suicide after a period of rational consideration about the implications, although she admits that her thinking is conjecture. When Vincent was a child, he asked Li why someone would give birth to children if she knew about suffering...