Kaitlin bled from her ear until dawn.

Doctor Dexter’s second diagnosis had been correct. Kaitlin had been infected with some ominously poly-drug-resistant bacteria that dissolved her tympanic membrane as neatly — one doctor told me — as if someone had poured a vial of acid into her ear. The surrounding small bones and nervous tissue were also affected, in the time it took for multiple doses of fluoroquinolones to battle back the infection. By the following nightfall two things were clear.

One, Kaitlin’s life was no longer in danger.

Two, she would never hear with that ear again. She would retain some hearing in her right ear, but it would be impaired.

Or maybe I should say three things became clear. Because it was plain to Janice by the time the sun went down that my absence was inexcusable and that she wasn’t prepared to forgive me for this latest lapse of adult judgment. Not this time — not unless my corpse washed up on the beach, and maybe not even then.

The interrogation went like this.

Three polite men arrived at the prison and apologized contritely for the conditions in which we were being held. They were in touch with the Thai government on our behalf “even as we speak,” and in the meantime, would we answer a few questions?

For instance, our names and addresses and Stateside connections, and how long had we been in Thailand, and what were we doing here?

(This must have been fun for Hitch. I simply told the truth: that I had been in Bangkok doing software development for a U.S.-based hotel chain and that I had stayed on for some eight months after my contract lapsed. I didn’t mention that I had planned to write a book about the rise and fall of expatriate beach culture in what the Thai travel guides are pleased to call the Land of Smiles — which had turned from a nonfiction work into a novel before it died aborning — or that I had exhausted my personal savings six weeks ago.