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Girls, girls, more girls. I'm upping the dose just to feel the same effect. A little blond cop, short hair, sexy, her badge on her belt, a gun, she gives me a look, I give her a look, we talk, she's on duty, I give her my number. A girl on a motorbike, I shout out to her as I'm crossing the road, she parks, comes over. A girl doing butterfly stroke, perfect body, I finish my length and give her a compliment, she comes to find me in the changing rooms. A trainee chef, shaved head, black double-breasted work jacket. A twenty-two-year-old Arab girl, bobbed hair, she tells me about her childhood in Hérault and her cousins in Grenoble, black clothes, white sneakers, nice skin. A fifty-year-old doctor who gets carried away, who wants to leave her husband, her children, but I leave her first. Like a convict counting the days, I check them off, I make lists, I draw up a tally on the wall.

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Can we do a selfie, Mom? He's got a phone now. I can't get him to give me his number. He says he doesn't know it by heart, he says, I'll have to ask Dad, then he looks at the floor. At the meeting space they say it shouldn't be like this, at the meeting space they're beginning to understand. We talk about my dad, we talk about the Weimaraner we used to have, we talk about a trip to Sicily we went on two years ago for his eighth birthday, a few months before the problems started, right before Laurent took him and I couldn't see him anymore. I'd said to him, Right, for your birthday, present or trip? He said trip. We'd never really been away, at least never abroad, I wanted him to see Italy. Off we went to Palermo, two days in June, to the Grand Hotel et des Palmes where Raymond Roussel killed himself, I spent the last of my money, he was Tadzio, I was Silvana Mangano, what a beautiful thing for a woman to have, a son. We went to the beach, we had granita, there was a street vendor shouting, Cocco bello, cocco bello! We laughed, we went inside the churches, we looked at the octopuses at the market, he danced in the street, spinning around in circles, his long arms spread out wide, singing, I watch the video on my phone now and then, it was great.

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