There’s a loud slam, a kind of thud, a crash like a chair being knocked over onto the tiled floor, and a little scream from her mother. Then the sound of Thierry shouting, and another scream. A thud. And silence.

It’s not as if Rat doesn’t have troubles of her own to keep her awake at night. Prime among them, the fact that she’s flunking school. Madame Renaud keeps sending home notes to Vanessa asking her to come in and discuss the problem, but Vanessa is too busy to go see her. Rat doesn’t think she could bear repeating a grade. Aside from having to hear all the same boring teachers explain the same boring things all over again, she’s already two feet taller than the kids in her own year.

Rat is thinking about how Marie Trintignant was murdered by her boyfriend Bernard Cantat. She was filming a movie in eastern Europe, and Cantat came to visit her. He murdered her in her hotel room during a drunken fight. He said he didn’t mean to, she was laying into him and he lost his temper. He said he thought she’d passed out drunk, but by the morning, she was dead. Marie Trintignant had young children, too.

Rat is holding her breath, listening for noise. But there’s silence. Maybe they’ve made up, or maybe they’ve gone to sleep. But maybe her mother’s dead.

“Morgan?”

No answer.

Only the catlike purr of her brother’s sleeping breath.

Rat creeps down from her loft, opens the door, and, heart thumping way too fast, ventures out into the living room. Empty, except for the usual chaos of leftover dinner. Does she dare go into Vanessa’s bedroom? The door is slightly ajar. She peeks through, heart pounding hard.

Her mother and Thierry lie in bed, seemingly asleep. Thierry is sprawled wide, snoring, Vanessa curled up with her back to him. Breathing. Alive.

Instead of feeling relieved, Rat’s just plain furious. Isn’t it mothers who are supposed to be worried about their teenaged daughters’ getting themselves killed?

She climbs back up into her sleeping loft.

Try to imagine yourself somewhere safe, Rat. The most magical place you can summon, like on the beach outside Tangier, you and Max and Vanessa and Morgan, with Morgan’s mother, Souad, still alive. Back in a time when everything seemed simpler.