“Rat, I’m going to wring your neck. Jérôme told me three weeks after you’d gone, ‘Oh, by the way, Rat’s fine, she’s gone to see her dad in London.’ Great. You told me you were going to fucking Collioure. Do you know what it’s like, three weeks of not even knowing if your children are alive? And even now that I know you’re safe—”

“I’m sorry if you worried,” says Rat.

“Never mind; it’s done with. I guess it’s hard for a child to put herself in a mother’s place. You can’t imagine how much I long for you, Rat. I think about when you were a little girl, how we used to sleep in the same bed, and you’d wrap your little arms tight around me, and give me butterly kisses on my eyelids—”

“I miss you, too,” says Rat, reluctantly.

“You’re my baby, Ratkin. My only love. You shouldn’t have walked out on me. Everything’s so empty without you. People keep asking when you and Morgan are coming back, they say I look terrible. Why didn’t you answer my e-mails?

“I haven’t slept a night through since you left; I’m nervous as a cat. Dr. Zakroune came around because I was having palpitations. I told him, Before you prescribe me anything, you have to cure the ache in my heart.

“When you have a daughter, you’ll see. I can’t bear to go into your bedroom and see both your beds empty. I think about Souad and I think I’d rather be dead, too. You could at least have left me Morgan, if you wanted to get away so badly.”

“Mama, it’s because of Morgan that we left—what Thierry did to him.”

There’s a pause. Rat can decipher the sounds of her mother lighting a cigarette, taking a deep drag. “You’re a little crazy on the subject of Thierry, you know that,” Vanessa’s voice says, finally. “You’ve always been mule-stubborn, and once you get some strange idea in your head—I thought Thierry could make us a family, I thought it would be good for you finally to have a man in the house. You and I, we were too close. We needed some air in there. And you liked him, too, remember you said how nice it was having him cooking meals and fixing this and that?”

“That was the first few months. Then he stopped fixing stuff.”

“Well, we were both wrong. He’s a creep, and I realize my life would probably be better without him, but—”

“It’s not just that he’s a creep, it’s that he molested Morgan.”