pours himself another glass of wine and puts My Way down by his feet.

“It wakes me up at night. Yesterday evening, I saw The Well-Digger’s Daughter on TV, and as it just deals with that, basically, just with fatherhood, love, and filiation, I cried all evening.”

“Father, you’re a very handsome man. You could meet someone and have a child.”

“And leave God? Never.”

We plunge the backs of our dessert forks into the sugar-fondant and ground-almond topping of one of our pastries. He can hear my disapproval, but says nothing. He simply smiles.

Often, he says to me, “Violette, I don’t know what you and God said to each other over breakfast this morning, but you seem very angry with him.” And I always reply, “It’s because he never wipes his feet before entering my house.”

“I am united with God. I committed myself to his path. I’m on Earth to serve him, but you, Violette, why not start over?”

“Because in life, one can never just start over. Take a piece of paper and tear it, you can stick each piece back together as much as you like, the tears will always remain, and the folds and the scotch tape.”

“Sure, but when the pieces are stuck back together, you can continue to write on that sheet.”

“Yes, if you own a good felt-tip pen.”

We burst into laughter.

“What are you going to do about your desire for a child?”

“Forget it.”

“A desire can’t be forgotten, especially when it’s visceral.”

“I’ll grow older, like everyone, and it will pass.”

“And if it doesn’t pass? It’s not because one grows older that one forgets.”

Father Cedric breaks into song:

“Along with time, along with time, goes, everything goes. The other whom one adored, for whom one searched in the rain, the other whose mind one could read, with just a glance . . . ”

“Have you ever adored someone?”

“God.”

“Someone?”

He replies to me, with a mouth full of crème pâtissière:

“God.”

45.

We think that death is an absence,

when in fact it’s a secret presence.

Léonine continued to make her belongings disappear. Her room emptied, bit by bit. Her clothes and toys went to the charity Emmaüs. Every time Paulo, that was his name, parked his truck with its picture of l’Abbé Pierre, the charity’s founder, outside my house, and I passed him bags full of pink, I felt as if I were donating one of Léo’s organs for another child’s benefit. For life to go on through her dolls, her skirts, her shoes, her castles, her beads, her cuddly toys, her crayons.

She made Christmas disappear. We never had a tree again. The famous synthetic tree, to avoid killing living ones, will probably remain the worst investment of my life. Easter, New Year, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays . . . I never again blew out a candle on a cake after her death.

I lived in a kind of permanent alcoholic coma. As if my body, to protect itself from the pain, had put itself into a state of inebriation without my swallowing the slightest drop of alcohol. Well, not always. Sometimes I drank like a bottomless pit. And that’s what I was, a bottomless pit. I lived in cotton wool, my movements were stilted, as if in slow motion. Like Tintin, when he was still hanging on the wall of Léonine’s room: I walked on the Moon.

I finished off the grenadine. I finished off the Prince biscuits, the Savane cakes, the pasta shells, the Advil Drops. Meanwhile, I got up, I lowered the barrier, I went back to bed, I got up again, I made food for Philippe Toussaint, I raised the barrier, I went back to bed again.

I said thank you to all the “Sincere condolences” in the Grand-Rue. I replied thank you to numerous letters. I filed the countless drawings by classmates in my choice of a blue folder. As if Léo had been a boy. As if she hadn’t really existed.

The worst of the worst was meeting the horrified eyes of Stéphanie, behind her register, every time I went through the door of the Casino. That and nights, that’s what I dreaded the most. I steeled myself for hours to manage to leave the house, cross the road, and open the door to the mini-market. I looked down while pushing my little shopping cart along the narrow aisles, until Stéphanie’s eyes met mine. The sorrow, the despair that clouded her eyes like a fog as soon as she caught sight of me. It was more than a mirror, it was desolation. She didn’t bat an eyelid when she saw what I was placing on the register’s conveyor belt. The bottles of alcohol. She announced the total, followed by “please.” I held out my debit card, entered my PIN, goodbye, see you tomorrow.

She no longer suggested the latest products to me, “the tops,” as she put it. All that stuff she’d tried out. The dish soap that softens your hands; the washing powder that smells nice and washes well even at thirty degrees, even in cold water; the delicious vegetable couscous from the frozen section; the magic duster; the omega-3 oil. You don’t suggest anything anymore to a mother who has lost her child. Not special offers, not savings coupons. You leave her to buy whiskey, eyes down. I could still feel Stéphanie’s eyes on my back as I opened my front door.

We dealt with insurers, lawyers. There would be legal proceedings, the management of Notre-Dame-des-Prés would be sued, we’d get the establishment closed down for good. Of course, we would receive compensation.

How much does a life weighing seven-and-a-half years cost?

Every night, I heard Léo’s voice again, her woman’s voice, saying to me, “Mommy, you must know what happened that night, you must know why my room burned down.” It was those words that made me keep going. But it took me years to act on them. I wasn’t physically able to. And the pain was far too strong for me to manage to resuscitate myself.

I needed time. Not time to feel better, I would never feel better. Time

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