A few days later Nicolas was knocking at the door of Madame’s flat.

‘You’ve come to check your work?’ I said, a warning. Madame was in the salon, reading her feuilleton.

‘My train leaves in an hour,’ he whispered. ‘I had to see you again.’

I pulled my shawl tightly around my shoulders. Loudly, I said, ‘We’re quite satisfied, there’s no need for you to come in.’

He cleared his throat, looked beyond me into the apartment. This time, without whispering: ‘Say you’ll wait for me. Say you’re done with that woman.’

There he stood in dirty boots, his hands stuffed deeply into his pockets as if he were being reprimanded instead of giving orders. He carried a small leather bag over his shoulder, which most likely contained everything he owned. I had been fooled. Had been a fool to believe such a wretch would have had the power to undo me.

‘I’ll wait for you,’ I said, knowing I would never see him again.

‘And?’

‘And I’m done with that woman. Now, go.’

He smiled, the first of his I’d seen; it was like dry plaster cracking.

29

Nora

Toronto, 1989

Saturday morning, the last weekend of August and the final hours of Carolina Cho’s Lake Ontario crossing. Nora, up at 5 a.m. She pulled herself from the bed, and from Anouk’s bedroom could hear the hum of the nebulizer. Anouk, up without an alarm, into her routine early so they wouldn’t be late to the beach.

Nora poured milk into a pan on the stove and prepared Anouk’s Creon with maple syrup. She also set on the table Anouk’s vitamins, liver pills and steroid puffer, and in her head a voice both mocking and kind: See? You can do this. See?

The only light in the kitchen was the stove light, and she stood at its edge stirring the milk, got a little lost and sleepy with the gentle scrape of the wooden spoon circling the bottom of the pan and the sweet smell of warming milk. Outside, the sky was indigo. The whole world in this muted moment was the nebulizer engine burring down the hall, and the froth just bubbling up on the surface of the milk, and the tick of a hot stove element. Linoleum tiles under bare, thick-skinned summer feet. She stirred three heaping teaspoons of chocolate powder into the milk and filled a thermos for the beach.

She went out of the kitchen door and across the backyard to the shed, which housed the lawnmower, a rusty rake, a shovel and crack-handled hoe. Also in the shed, on a dusty shelf and behind a stack of terracotta pots laced with cobwebs, Nora kept her cigarettes. With feet dew-wet and the smell of damp wood and cool earth, she retrieved her stash along with a lighter and an ashtray full of stubbed-out butts leaning against each other like sinking gravestones. She stepped outside the shed, behind it so Anouk couldn’t see, and lit one up, blew the smoke sky-high. She looked up at those few morning stars, and felt the shunt of smoke going down the windpipe and curling into the furthest corners of her lungs. The guilt was as pungent as the smell. She revelled in guilt. She was wandering wife. She was mother.