"Will You Be There?" by Guillaume Musso, summary

A French writer combines classic melodrama with science fiction about time loops. This book is a psychological drama about the burden of choice, where the price of saving the woman he loves is voluntarily giving up intimacy with her. The author wrote this novel in 2006, inspired by reflections on the irreparable mistakes of youth and the cinematic pace of American thrillers.

In 2016, South Korean director Hong Ji-yeon released a successful film adaptation of the book, Will You Be There?, starring Kim Yun-seok.

Golden capsules from the Cambodian wilderness

In the fall of 2006, sixty-year-old Californian surgeon Eliot Cooper operates on little Lu-Nan in a remote Asian village. The baby was born with a cleft palate. As a token of his gratitude, the village elder presents the doctor with a glass vial containing ten golden pills that will grant his wish. Eliot confesses his longing for his Brazilian girlfriend, Ilena, who died thirty years ago. The elderly doctor is terminally ill with lung cancer.

He hides his terminal diagnosis from his 20-year-old daughter, Angie, and his devoted friend, Matt DeLuca.

In San Francisco, a surgeon decides to take a pill before bed. A sudden shudder transports his consciousness back to September 1976. The doctor finds himself in an airport waiting room, right in front of his thirty-year-old self. The younger Eliot has just seen Ilena off to Florida. A sudden hemorrhage interrupts their conversation, and the traveler disappears into a restroom stall. In the morning, the old man finds a napkin from his past in his pajama pocket.

Message on the skin

The following night, the elderly surgeon takes the capsule again. Appearing on the terrace of his own mansion thirty years ago, he reveals to the young doctor the dark secrets of their shared youth. He reminds him of his alcoholic father and the death of Rose’s mother, who jumped from a twelfth-story window. The frightened young man throws a heavy chair at the glass door. The visitor disappears into the darkness. A shiny silver lighter engraved with the year 2000 remains on the wooden table.

A young doctor asks Detective Malden to conduct a covert forensic examination. The older officer uses cyanoacrylate vapor to reveal fingerprints. The lighter residue matches Cooper’s samples perfectly.

A shocked doctor gets a message inked on his forearm at a tattoo parlor, requesting a new appointment. In 2006, the letters appear on the aging surgeon’s skin in permanent blue ink.

Three strict conditions

Matt sends Cooper to Ilena in Orlando. There, the girl cares for marine animals. The doctor finds his beloved by a pool with killer whales. At a local café, an elderly visitor confronts the doppelganger and confesses that Ilena is destined to die at the end of the year.

A young surgeon leaves a secret note in his mother’s antique atlas, demanding an explanation. Another late-night meeting takes place on the veranda of Hemingway’s Key West home. The old man agrees to prevent the tragedy only if three clauses are observed. The first rule requires absolute silence from others. The second requires abandoning his lover forever immediately after the rescue. The third clause obliges the young doctor to spend the night with a Milanese colleague at a medical convention in Verona on April 6, 1985, precisely for the sake of Angie’s birth.

On December 24, 1976, Cooper is tending to a dying drug addict, Emily Duncan. An old double appears on the hospital roof just in time. The surgeon learns the details of Ilena’s death: in the original reality, an argument over a cancelled flight pushed the girl into a pool with a crazed killer whale, Annushka. Eliot immediately calls Orlando, warning of their imminent arrival. In the hero’s hands, the newspaper article instantly changes. The predator dies on impact with the plane, and the veterinarian remains unharmed.

Jump from the Golden Gate

It’s a cold Christmas morning. A young surgeon fulfills the cruel dictates of his pact. He lies to Ilena about cheating on her with a colleague and claims his feelings are fading. Stunned by the sudden betrayal, she leaves in a taxi. The doctor buys heroin from a street dealer named Yamda and drinks himself into oblivion in the empty house. He drives Matt away, refusing to give up his share of the Napa Valley vineyard.

In 2006, the old man discovers a terrible truth. Abandoned, Ilena didn’t board the plane to Florida. She jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge into the icy waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

An elderly Cooper takes two more capsules and returns to the operating room in 1976. The girl is in a coma with pelvic fractures and ruptured organs. Threatening anesthesiologist Samantha Ryan with publicity about his long-standing medical misstep, the old man steps up to the operating table. He performs a precise craniotomy, removing a deep venous sinus hematoma.

Waking up in the future, the doctor locates the rescued Ilena through the Waverville phone system. He silently looks at her from behind, near the redwood tree. At a roadside café in 1976, the surgeon bids his doppelganger a final farewell. He relieves the young man of the heavy burden of childhood guilt for family tragedies.

A lonely path through life

The young surgeon begins a new life, immersing himself in operating theatre. Ilena spends a long time recovering in a rehabilitation center, leaves veterinary medicine for good, and goes to teach marine biology at Stanford University. Matt searches for a waitress, Tiffany, in Texas. They marry while developing a wine business.

In the spring of 1985, Eliot met cardiologist Giulia Battini in Verona. Nine months later, little Angie was born. Her father took the baby to San Francisco, raising his daughter with his devoted dog, Scoundrel.

In February 2007, a sixty-one-year-old surgeon dies of respiratory failure on the terrace of his home. At the funeral, Matt receives a farewell package from an adult Angie. A wooden box containing a vintage wine contains Cooper’s diary, containing a detailed confession.

The last cigarette

A Frenchman finds the tenth golden capsule in the spine of an old atlas. He drinks it with a sleeping pill and finds himself in a rainy February of 1977. A breathless Matt runs into the staff room of Lenox Hospital, snatches a burning cigarette from the fingers of young Cooper, and stubs it on the tiled floor. Eliot realizes his motive and throws the whole pack in the trash.

Reality is rewritten. In 2007, Matt wakes up in a wrecked SUV on Lombard Street. The diary disappears from Ilena’s house, as Cooper didn’t die of a tumor and didn’t leave a posthumous letter. She arrives in San Francisco and walks along the shore to meet a living Eliot.