Soon, my old reflexes kicked in. I glanced at my watch. Face still broken – 10:32. No joy to be expected there. I thrust my right hand into my bag in search of my phone, which I hadn’t thought about since the previous day, something that hadn’t happened since . . . After rummaging around in my crammed handbag, I realized that my smartphone wasn’t in there, and I remembered dropping it at the time of the accident.

I stopped walking. JP. I’d been in the middle of a call from JP. I hadn’t got back to him, hadn’t spared a single thought for him, for our sodding presentation to Mr Head Honcho, taking place tomorrow. I was supposed to work on the slides on Sunday, and Sunday was today. JP must be in a panic not to have heard a peep from me. A panic over the presentation, naturally. Didn’t give a shit about me. I wondered what he might have heard of the accident. Had he been an audio witness, or had the telephone smashed beforehand? I recalled my sensations of the moment and felt certain that the phone had been smashed immediately. JP hadn’t heard anything. That reassured me, in a way, because I had no wish to face the contrived sympathetic looks of my colleagues at Hégémonie. My career was going to be my lifeline. If I lost my job, then I would no longer be anyone. I had to cling to that vestige of normality at all costs. Cling on to Thelma the marketing director of the specialty-shampoos division, and not allow her to be buried under Thelma the mother of a child in a coma.

No matter how hard I tried to think about JP and my work, images of the accident continued to haunt me. I heard my own screams echo, felt a rising wave of nausea and couldn’t stop myself from vomiting right there, in the middle of the street. I coughed and gagged several times. An old lady, taking her dog for a walk, crossed the road to avoid me. The legendary Parisian concern for others.

I sat on the steps of an apartment building to get my breath back, calm down, distance myself from all the sound and the fury. How long did I sit there like that? Long enough to let my hands, my ears and my cheeks forget the biting cold.

Then, a few thoughts began to take shape. I slowly outlined my new short-term goals. I can’t move forward if I don’t have goals. I’ve never lived any other way. Since the accident, all my goals had become irrelevant. So I drew up a new brief but hard-hitting list that would be the focus of all my efforts, all my energy, in the coming days. Afterwards, we’d see.

Goal number one: get Louis out of the coma.

Goal number two: carry on with my job, as before.