As they walked back through the city streets, the October cold not wholly unpleasant, the boy sloped two steps behind her, but in her eyeline, always in her eyeline. As they strolled, history announcing itself at every corner, she answered a call from her mother. Since they had moved, her mother rang a lot and spoke in her usual steady stream, like she was being held hostage and needed to get all the information out before her throat was slit. The woman understood this way of speaking only after she became a mother herself. She would barely be recovered from one of these conversations when another would happen. Her mother was retired and bored. What was she supposed to do now? What was she supposed to do in that house? Just thinking about it made her want to get another job.

‘Don’t do that,’ the woman said, ‘start going to exhibitions. I’ve just been to one.’

‘I thought you didn’t like art.’

‘I don’t like artists. There’s a difference.’

When she let herself and the boy into the apartment they were renting, all the apartments built discreetly into the architecture of the city as if to obscure the fact that families lived in them at all, there was a notice on the front door. It was a picture, not unlike those in the exhibition, but less celebrated, of two cockroaches, one on the left, one on the right, with X’s running vertically through their bodies. There were some words promising there had been cockroaches and now they were gone, or there was an ongoing effort to get rid of the cockroaches. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t read or speak French. Later, in bed, with her husband, under crisp, ironed sheets, she tried to sleep off the possibility of cockroaches.

‘I love you,’ he whispered.

She blinked anxiously in the dark, as if trying to identify something. ‘Go easy on that stuff,’ she advised him.

*

Maybe the problem was that she was tired. She had been a bit tired when she entered art college, but dropping out had exhausted her. She remembered the final meeting, her prepared speech about why she was leaving, the made-up family reasons; then interrupting herself; then, finally, silence.

‘You should leave if you’re unhappy,’ they said.

‘I’m unhappy because I don’t think I belong here.’

Nobody begged her. It was cute that she had tried in the first place. She put the sculptures she had made in her first year in her parents’ garage and her mother used them to hang up wet clothes.