“Have you got a sweetheart yet, Momo? Which of the little girls at school is your sweetheart? Is it Solenne? No? Have you been with a girl yet, or are you and your friends still playing with each other’s zizis in the back alley?”

And then his voice got suddenly sharp. “Don’t let the fucking dog go, do you hear me?”

“He’s biting me!” Morgan shouted back, equally furious, and came storming into their bedroom, slamming the door.

Thierry followed him, but when he saw Rat was there, he said only, “There’s to be no slamming of doors in this house, do you hear me?” and left.

“What was he saying, about you and girls and shit?” Rat asked Morgan when he’d gone.

Morgan was lying on his bed, scowling. “I don’t know.”

“Has he talked to you that way before?”

“No.”

“Well, tell me if he tries it again. It’s not right.”

Funny, Thierry’s knack for poisoning goodwill. When he first moved in, the neighbors were thrilled Vanessa had a proper boyfriend at last. Everybody’d loved Max and they knew how sad Vanessa had been since he was gone. Jean-Luc and Laurent would invite Thierry to join them at pétanque, or Cristel would ask him along on her monthly trip across the Spanish border to load up on cheap cigarettes and gasoline. But after a while, people were barely speaking to him.

The turning point was one evening at Marielle and Jean-Luc’s.

Dinners at the Cabreras’ were festive. Jean-Luc liked to mix his own music—he’d put on some combo of Tuareg blues, New Wave tango, birdsong—and after dinner, he’d open a bottle of eau-de-vie made by his brother-in-law in the Auvergne. Liquor that had been concocted in the same spirit as Marielle baked her cherry tart. Something homemade, to be enjoyed together. But that wasn’t how Thierry drank. It grated on him being another man’s guest, and he drank as if you were trying to cheat him with your liquor, and when he was half drunk, he needled and sniped, and when he was three-quarters drunk, he ranted.

The conversation had turned to politics. Jean-Luc and Marielle, like Vanessa, were old-fashioned leftists, but Thierry on this particular evening decided to take the side of the entrepreneurial classes. He told them how France was going to the dogs, because nobody was willing to work anymore. French people were lazy, and the immigrants they let in were even lazier.