Another building job has started for Manuel. The swimming pool is done on the old one, the tiles laid so that bitch couldn’t complain. By the time she came back, the work was finished, and the newly filled pond was lapping near the enlarged swimming pool. He pictured glasses of champagne and arms resting on the edge. He pictured the bitch’s body under the concrete. He’s been working on a new villa in Ménerbes for the past two weeks. He misses Patrick. He had no friend closer than him. But he understands why Patrick left, and he, too, sometimes wishes he could leave and forget what he’s done. He wishes he wouldn’t bump into his neighbour every morning and see her inconsolable mother’s expression. He also wishes he didn’t wake up every night drenched in sweat, his heart pounding. When that happens, he gets up and goes to watch the little one sleeping; it’s the only thing that calms him down.

The police haven’t been back. Social services have, on the other hand. Séverine keeps lashing out at the social worker. But, when all’s said and done, she loves hating her and doesn’t hate having a cup of tea with her once or twice a month and complaining about her working conditions and about how hard it is to be a mother and a grandmother before she’s even turned forty. She’s helped them get benefits and that’s very useful, although Manuel doesn’t like to think about that. There’s never been a question of taking the child into care, so Séverine has relaxed a little, even though she doesn’t like the way this bitch looks at their lives, and her smile whenever Séverine tells her about Jo’s good marks at the lycée, that smug smile as if it’s thanks to her.

The smoke is stinging Manuel’s throat; he pokes the pieces of wood with the tip of a metal spade.

Séverine can smell the leaves and the wood all the way from the kitchen. When she goes to the girls’ room – there are three of them now – to check everything’s all right, she comes across her own reflection in the corridor mirror. She stops for a second and studies her beauty, pushing forty, the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, the lines around her mouth from laughter and bitterness. The skin under her chin, smooth but already too soft. An internal lamentation starts inside her head, at once coarse and elegiac – time is giving her a kind of poetry she never knew before. She suddenly jumps because a door opens abruptly: Jo appears, holding a large bag, and hurtles down the stairs without looking at her. When Séverine glances into the bedroom, she stands leaning against the doorjamb for a moment, watching her daughter asleep, the child curled up against her.