“And,” she concludes with a complicit little smile, “things with Manuel are as hot as they were at the beginning.”

Charlotte shakes her head. Impervious – or not? – to the cruelty of her association of ideas, she carries on. “What about Sabrina? Any news?”

Sabrina, the last member of the amazing girl trio who reigned supreme in 1992, is currently vegetating in a Monclar high-rise. Not a penny in her pocket, with three children and three guys somewhere out there, she had to agree to move her family to whatever social housing she was allocated. Charlotte knows perfectly well that Sabrina spends her life writing letters of complaint, mad, paranoid letters, to the local authorities. That social services know her life by heart. That her attractive adolescent curves, which made boys salivate, turned into flab a long time ago, and that no guy wants to take her clothes off in the back of a car, or anywhere else for that matter.

“She’s fine.”

“Do you still see each other?”

“She lives too far away. With work and all… We don’t meet up as often as we used to. Hardly ever, in fact.”

Charlotte suddenly livens up, a girlish pout on her perfect face. “Remember the time Thierry was caught by his father after the party at Fred’s house?”

Séverine tears the rabbit’s head off her key ring. It was hanging on by a few threads. And now it’s lying in the middle of the table like a bloodied trophy.

“I have to go.”

“Really? So soon?”

“It was nice to see you.”

They hug like before, smacking kisses, and Charlotte stays on the terrace with her book and her large sunglasses, like a Parisienne.

Séverine slowly walks away, trips over a flagstone, speeds up, swears, then speeds up again. She clutches her bag. She keeps repeating that she won’t see Charlotte again. She goes past the clothes shop she normally likes but hates right now. The entire collection suddenly looks totally boring. The sales assistant waves at her but Séverine cannot respond. She wishes she was living in a sprawling apartment complex, in a huge city where no sales assistant would remember her name, and nobody would know she’s about to become a grandmother at thirty-four. A city that’s not a village.

Back at the car, her chest heaves too hard with irregular breathing. Despite herself, she emits throaty little sounds, like a puppy that’s being beaten. She drops her keys. She crouches, puts a hand on the asphalt, palm open, and lets out a deep breath. With her right hand, she fiddles with the little dolphin around her neck. Finally, she finds the rabbit’s body and the keys, attached, and swoops them up with rage.

A gigantic city where she would not have grown up. A city where she would never have been twelve, or sixteen, or twenty. A city where she wouldn’t have marked every bench and every wall with the insolence of her youth. When Séverine sits behind the wheel of her car, she doesn’t start the engine straight away. She strokes the belly of the headless rabbit for a long time, to calm herself down.