‘What do you want from me? Do you want me to go and speak to the men at your house? Tell them there was never a theft?’

Nicolas held up the postcard again and leaned even closer to me. With his thumb and forefinger, he pulled gently on the lobe of my ear.

‘Never,’ I said, and pushed him by the chest. He laughed at me as I walked away.

But it wasn’t going to be as easy as walking away from a drunk boy. I lived the next few days in terror. I watched Monsieur Muller, who was as sour as always but whose attitude towards me remained unchanged, and I watched Audette, who was busy and friendly and disinterested. Everywhere I went, to purchase bread or vegetables or wine, I was like an animal stalked. I had no appetite and, instead of sleeping at night, I composed horror stories that grew worse as morning drew closer: Nicolas confronting Axelle at her place of work, or even more awful, where she lived; Madame sending me home, shamed, back to Tante Huguette, to being told my presence was a burden.

Not knowing what was going to happen, or when, was far worse than anything he could have done to me.

So. It was a relief when, on a Saturday morning, I found an envelope addressed to me on the floor of the vestibule. It had been pushed under the door. Inside, the postcard of the two women. This time, I looked at it. The one on the bed, she had an arm bent behind her head, exposing a thatch of dark hair in the pit of the arm. The other woman who leaned above, as if about to mount the one lying down, was tied at the upper thighs and hips with some kind of wooden phallus, which dangled from her crotch like a puppet. The woman on her back lay with neck arched, legs open, other arm loosely around the shoulders of her dominant mistress, whose face was concealed. On the back of the card, scrawled in blunt pencil, the name of a cheap Montmartre hotel, a date and hour.

I exhaled for what seemed the first time in days.

27

Nora

Toronto, 1989

At six in the morning, Nora pulled herself out of bed and, on legs still dumb with sleep, walked down the windowless hallway. She stopped at Anouk’s bedroom, door mostly closed, put her ear to the crack in the doorway and listened to Anouk’s breathing. Smooth and clear. She smiled, carried on to the bathroom.

Nora had moved into this apartment a year and a half before, only a few weeks after the night of the hospital. The night of the buck. And it was so good to be home. Mel had helped her to find this place, on the ground floor of a four-plex on Queen Street, a few minutes from the beach. It was small and creaked with imperfections. The window in the bathroom was painted shut and some of the tiles in the kitchen were coming up. The storm windows in the living room, at the front of the apartment, looked like they hadn’t been removed in years and were coated with dust and grime. The oven took an age to warm up and there was very little pressure in the shower.