She turns on the grill. Pours milk into a saucepan. Then she goes back into the bedroom to rouse Morgan. The sleeping child is curled up under his duvet. His body in its astronaut pajamas—pajamas she remembers back from when they were Jérôme’s—is a small oven. She presses her face close to Morgan’s, breathes in his toasty breath.

Rat can remember when Morgan’s sleeping breath changed from being baby’s breath, milky-sweet, to stale, like a grown-up’s. She likes it even stale.

“Wake up, bedbug.” She tickles him.

Morgan gives a great stretch that bops her on the nose and lunges back into sleep. She tickles him harder, and he grumbles, punching her again. Morgan sleeps the way he eats: hearty, even, indefatigable. Three square a day, ten hours a night. Unlike Rat, who’s finicky, fretful, liable to upset stomachs and nightmares.

Rat opens Morgan’s chest drawers—there’s one that’s splintered apart; in the old days when she and Thierry were still speaking, he would have fixed it for her—pulls out underpants, tracksuit bottoms, a T-shirt. Tries to find two socks whose toes and heels aren’t completely bald. One sock Pokémon, one sock Bugs Bunny but at least they’re roughly the same noncolor. Throws the bundle on his bed.

“C’mon. It’s time for me to get going.”

In the mornings, Jean-Luc drops off Rat at Victor Hugo on his way to work, while Morgan and Solenne, who aren’t due at school till eight thirty, go with Marielle.

She gets out two bowls, scoops a tablespoon of Nesquik into each. Morgan is in charge of grilling the bread, because Rat always forgets and burns it. When she’s grown up, she’ll get a toaster like Marielle’s.

Rat now attends to her own toilette: a perfunctory swab of deodorant under each armpit. Climbs back into the faded nest of last night’s corduroys, grabs a 2 Many DJ’s T-shirt that’s somehow wound up in her drawer, slips into her flip-flops, considers running a brush through her matted hair and thinks better of it. She has a raw nerve in her broken tooth that she’s been telling her mother about for months now.

And only then remembers, Today’s my birthday.

When Rat gets into Jean-Luc’s car, the radio is booming.

An agitated reporter describes last night’s rioting. “As soon as darkness fell, they were out in the streets. Dozens of masked figures carrying tankards of gasoline, setting fire to cars, smashing store windows. I talked to the owner of a bakery on the boulevard Aristide Briand who’d had her shop windows broken.”