“Of course. Everybody knew him. Celia’s son. He used to ride around town on his motorbike, usually with some drop-dead blonde hanging off the back, who me and my friends’d be doing hexes on—shrivel up and die, you old witch. He was gorgeous. And then that night, it was like, Oh my God, there’s Gillem. And he’s all by himself!”

“So you asked him to dance …?”

“We danced, we talked. He had this really cute English accent. I asked him where his girlfriend was, he said she’d gone back to London. I said, Oh, so my voodoo spells worked.”

“What did he say?”

“He laughed. Then we danced some more, and he asked me if I’d like to go for a walk on the cliffs.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’d had so much to drink I was scared I’d fall over. And he was like, Don’t worry, we’ll fall together.”

That remark Vanessa thought dead-romantic, but Rat found it a bit too weird, as if her parents might just as easily have died that night, instead of producing her.

“And after that summer, you never saw him again?”

“They stopped coming to Collioure.”

“So you never saw him again?”

“Never.”

“Wouldn’t you like to go find him someday?”

“What for? We do pretty well on our own, don’t you think?”

When Rat tries to picture her father, it’s never as a grown man, but always as a boy her age, like her friend Jérôme who lives next door, or the Gypsy kids she plays with in the market at Brix. She pictures him the way he looks in the photograph: a boy in a white lace shirt with a mass of tangled black hair falling in his eyes.

Rat imagines showing this boy the treasures she keeps in an old tin lozenge box: bits of sea glass, the china favors she’s collected from previous years’ Twelfth Night cakes. When she climbs a tree, Gillem is on the branch next to her. She can imagine her father as being this eight-year-old child, but she can’t picture him as a grown man. Can’t picture him eating supper at Vanessa’s kitchen table, or driving Rat to school in the morning, or coming to kiss her goodnight. Can’t imagine him doing any of the things fathers do on a Sunday afternoon: trimming the hedge, or tinkering with the car, or playing pétanque with the neighbors, or yelling at you to clean up your room.

The first time she is conscious of seeing her mother—whom she’d thought as much a part of herself as the scar on her forehead or her broken front tooth—judged by a stranger’s eyes.