In a soccer field near Éric and Virginie’s apartment in their reasonably decent banlieue of Paris, the guys tried to throw boomerangs for a while with complete lack of success. Éric had just failed his driver’s license a second time and needed something to console him besides Fabien’s and Sébastien’s open mockery. Then we took baguettes, ham, butter, and cheese out onto a pier in the canal. The water was dark and quiet, lapping against the pilings. I huddled against the rapidly chilling evening and gazed at the sky. Faint and far off a star showed, probably a planet, everything else faded out by the dull night sky over Paris.

“So I’ve got a game for you, Laura,” Éric said.

I blinked, coming back from the quiet fringes of this evening. Sébastien kept a hand on some part of me at pretty much all times, and the others did try to include me, but despite my best efforts I kept drifting back out to the outskirts of this tight little group and all their fast-paced, slang-filled jokes. “All right.” From his tone, it sounded like a game Éric thought he could win. Virginie gave him a tolerant look, confirming my impression. So he wanted revenge for Risk.

“I start a sentence with one word. The next person repeats my word and adds the second word. And we keep going around until only one person is left who can remember all the words.”

I slid him a glance and didn’t say anything.

“Claire used to be really good at this, remember?” he asked the group at large.

Virginie kicked him. Fabien pushed his glasses up on his nose and turned to me. “More to drink, Laura?”

I looked at all of them. Sébastien’s face was carefully neutral. “Who’s Claire?”

Everyone gave me a surprised look, including Sébastien. “His old girlfriend,” Éric said. “They were together for six years. We all grew up together. You didn’t know about her?”

Let me get this straight: there had once been five people in this intimate group, and the fifth person had been Sébastien’s girlfriend? Whom he’d been with six years? He was only twenty-four. Six years was most of his dating life.

“We broke up about four years ago, crevette,” Sébastien said. “I never mentioned her?” No, he hadn’t. Did he think it was something I wanted to know about? If they had broken up when he was twenty, they had dated since he was fourteen. So she was not only his long-term girlfriend but probably his first serious girlfriend, and she and the rest of this group had grown up together.

“What, did you think you were getting a new car?” Éric teased me.