The blonde woman behind the counter is looking at them as if they aren’t children but something alien, potentially threatening. “Anything else?” she asks, pointedly.

They eat their pains au raisins sitting on the seawall, looking over the beach, but it’s too cold to linger. They climb back uphill, and make their way once more to Les Glycines, where they sit themselves down on Mémé Catherine’s doorstep.

Not long before a woman next door is parting her kitchen curtains to peer out at them. A man comes to join her. Together, they look at the children. Rat jumps to her feet and rings their bell. For the longest time, she thinks no one will answer. Finally, the woman opens the front door a crack.

“Yes? What do you want?” she calls.

“I’m looking for Madame Bonnet,” Rat shouts back.

The woman examines Rat from the safety of her doorstep. She’s clearly not going to budge. “Are you the same people who came by last night? She’s not here.”

“Has she gone away? I’m her granddaughter.”

A long pause. “She’s at the clinic.”

“Is she sick?”

The woman looks over Rat, probably wondering why this so-called granddaughter isn’t better clued in about her grandmother’s health. Rat wishes she’d packed a hairbrush.

“Madame Bonnet is doing rehab for her hip replacement,” the woman says, finally. “She won’t be back for a good month. What did she say, Gérard? End of June, I think. Are you the granddaughter who lives outside Lille?”

Lille? This must be Aunt Marie-Christine and her children.

“Yes,” lies Rat.

It takes them longer than Rat expected to reach the dynamite factory. This time, she opts to go along the main road. Below is sharp black cliff, paler sea. The distance from Collioure to the bay of Paulilles, a few minutes in Florian’s car, proves interminable on foot. It’s scary to make one’s way through the miles and miles of dark tunnels, with only a few inches of pedestrian curb clearly intended only for emergency use. When cars and trucks hurtle past, she and Morgan press themselves tight against the cavey walls.

When they finally reach the factory, Rat first throws their backpacks over the gates, then helps Morgan to scale them.

But once they are safely inside the park enclosure, she feels oddly at peace. It’s as if everything ugly and menacing—Thierry, the lady in the bakery, Mémé Catherine’s neighbors, the loud angry cars that seemed to be trying deliberately to crush the two children against the tunnel walls—remains on the far side of the chained gates of the dynamite factory.

No one can find us here, she thinks. Only Jérôme and Florian know about it, and they will never tell.