The Person Already There

Tomás Martínez had built a life that worked. He was twenty-eight years old in the October the book begins. He had a flat in the old town of Alicante he had been renting for several years, a job at the town hall that was interesting more days than it was not, a mother in Aspe he visited on Sundays, a sister whose two children he was the godfather of one of, and a small steady circle of friends. He had accepted, somewhere around twenty-six, that the falling-in-love that happens to other people was probably not going to happen to him. The acceptance had been quiet. He had also accepted that the love he had felt at eleven for the boy who had been his closest friend was the love his life had given him, and that he was unlikely to be given another of similar weight.

Then, on an October afternoon, in a café on Calle San Francisco, the boy walks back in. Older. Quieter. Returned from the mountains a different man. He sits down. He asks how Tomás is. He waits for the answer.

The ground begins to move. Not loudly. Not catastrophically. It begins to move the way a thing moves when the foundation under it has been quietly cracking for sixteen years and has now, for the first time, been seen. What follows is a winter in Tomás's life that he had not been planning to have. A search begins in him. The search has no map. He finds himself, slowly, having conversations he had not been planning to have — with his mother, with his sister, with the friend across the table, eventually with an old man on a wall in the sun above the village of Sella.

The Person Already There is the second volume of The Master Wu Cycle. It is the careful slow unravelling of a life that had been working, and the equally careful search that the unravelling begins. The work is not to build a new self. The work is to turn toward the one who has been there the whole time.