I watched snow fall outside the window in large, airy, moonlit bundles, snow that would not be there in the morning. I thought about how I had come to this place, how it passed that I now sat alone in this room with a woman who had been, essentially, a stranger. A woman who depended on me wholly and whom, I realized, I enjoyed looking after. I was good at it. And I wondered: how had I travelled so, so far from home? I thought about Tante Huguette, a woman who had been given no choice but to raise me and whose life was now, it seemed, tremendously improved without me in it.

Snow tumbled, rolled softly, only to melt once it hit the wet ground, and I thought about my father, bones in a pine box sunk in the earth next to a similar box containing the bones of my mother. Who was dead because of me.

My family – my father, my grandmother, my dispassionate aunt – had never been good at remembering their dead. I knew almost nothing of my mother’s parents or her parents’ parents. I knew very little of my father’s ancestry. My grandmother had a brother who’d been kicked in the head by a horse when he was six years old. I knew that the incident had left him blind, but I did not know his name.

Snow fell and I wondered: is it death when your heart stops beating? When you stop taking breath? Is it death when the rivers that run through your mind turn black? Is it death when the last living creature that feeds off your body has picked the bones dry? Or is it death, finally, when there is no one left alive who remembers you? It seemed not many generations needed to pass before one’s existence was completely forgotten. As if she had never been.

Madame had fallen asleep with her liqueur glass in her hand. I slipped it from her fingers and set it on the table, and blew out the candle. The wick glowed red, then faded, then disappeared and there was nothing left but the sweet smell of paraffin wax.

Madame spoke, a bodiless voice in the dark. ‘You won’t leave, will you?’

‘I’ll stay until you’re asleep.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

I knew she was thinking about her babies. Her grief was there in the room with us – it always was. It came from a part of her that saw no light. I felt for her hand in the dark, took it in mine, and kissed it.

Neither Nicolas nor I said anything about the money, and I believed the matter was resolved. Soon enough the cabinets were ready to be mounted on the wall, complete with new hinges that I had purchased myself, forged by the metalworker who’d been recommended to me by the butcher. The handles, purchased from the same metalworker, would be delivered in a week’s time. Madame had given me the responsibility of choosing them myself, and what I’d selected was simple and elegant. Nicolas had been right: new cupboards needed new handles.