Jo asked Saïd’s friends, the ones in the Docteur Ayme neighbourhood, if they’d seen him again, but nobody knew anything. The two mates who were going to join him clearly shut their mouths immediately, used to the police constantly harassing them. Some of them were questioned by the police, but then nothing had happened. The guys would shrug, annoyed that Saïd hadn’t let them in on his secret, but since he’d started hanging around antique dealers, he’d got a bit cocky. So Jo then also went to ask questions around the second-hand market in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, but the old thieves with dandy airs didn’t know anything either. The car remained parked outside the house for a while but then disappeared. His father must have sold it. His mother holds back her tears whenever the girls drop by. As a result, the girls no longer drop by that often. But Jo works near her in the vineyard.

She now takes off her shoes, leaving her damp socks scrunched up at the bottom of her sneakers. Then her jeans, which stick to her thighs. She staggers a little – the moisture has made the fabric clingy – but she pulls them off, the way an insect tears off its skin, and throws them inside out onto the strongly fragrant, wild mint that has taken over part of the ground.

Strange, how you get used to everything. Jo wouldn’t have thought that Saïd’s absence would become a part of her life. He’s always been there, and yet she accepts his disappearance with a subtle resentment, as if he’d left to spite her. This creates a void, a pain of abandonment that makes the colours of her life more intense. She pictures him settling, alone, in a foreign country; she sees him walking down unfamiliar streets, glorified by having dared to take this step. Sometimes, she thinks he simply fell into a ditch and died of exposure, but this theory doesn’t stick. She prefers the other version, the one where he’s strolling around a foreign city in his Ray-Bans; then he thinks about her and perhaps feels sorry for abandoning her here. She, too, is going to leave. She’s sure of it now.