“All right, here’s a better one,” and this is something she’s wanted to mention for a while now. “You told me that you and Daddy separated suddenly, that you were both in love all those years when I was little. You always told us that, Mom, that we were born out of love.”

“That’s true. It’s absolutely true. We loved each other very, very much.” There was no day happier in all her life than the day Tristan was born. They were living in Paris then. That morning at the market is still so vivid: the wet stalls, the bag of peaches, the young face of the vendor, the train of pimples across his neck. She was reaching over the cherries to squeeze an avocado when she felt the warmth on her legs, when she finally made the distinction between her own water and the rain. And in the afternoon, Robert brought Flo to the hospital. They climbed up on the bed with her and Tristan and pretended they didn’t understand French when the nurse scolded them. That day was just a culmination of the happiness that had been pooling inside her from the moment she met Robert, yet afterward there was only more, a peaceful, languorous bliss. They had jokes about it, about how so much happiness was depressing. “All those years, Flo, right up until last year, we were happy. You were born and raised in a tremendous amount of love.”

“And then something just happened, just like that?”

“I don’t know.” Marie-Claude can’t bear to play the unknowing victim, to actually reveal how bewildered she still is. But her daughter wants the truth. “I just don’t know. Whatever happened, it didn’t happen to me.” She looks at Flo in the rearview mirror and says softly, with no edge, “Maybe Daddy can explain it better.”

“He says it happened slowly. He said it wasn’t a big clap of thunder like you always say but a wave that gets bigger and bigger until it breaks.”

Marie-Claude knows Flo is not making this up to hurt her; she recognizes her husband’s similes, stolen from a world entirely alien to him.

“He said he’d been unhappy since before Tristan. He said he hadn’t known anything about real love before he met Abigail. He says he always knows when witnesses are lying because they remind him of himself when he was—”

“Please, Flo. Please stop.”