Heloise blinked a couple of times. “Margaux? What does that mean?”

“I was told that there was a Margaux Perrossier who wanted to visit me. I thought, okay, let’s find out who that is and what she has to say to me. After all, a stranger is better than no one.” He laughed a brief, joyless laugh. “She was better than no one.” He nodded to himself.

Heloise ignored the implied accusation. “What happened next?”

“Next … well, then we sat here, where you and I are sitting now. She asked if I knew who she was. I said no. I couldn’t remember having seen her before. She asked if I had really repented, if what I was convicted of was something that I regretted.”

“And?”

“And I told her that I had, I did.” He looked down at the table as he spoke. “That I had always struggled with the feelings I had inside me.” He looked up. “And I really have, Heloise. I have always struggled against my—”

“I don’t want to hear about that.” Heloise held her trembling hand up in front of him. “I don’t want to hear about your feelings, so put away your excuses. There must be a priest or someone here that you can talk to, but I don’t want to hear a word about it, is that understood?”

“Yes.”

“I mean it.” She looked him up and down coolly. “If you start with your excuses again, I’m leaving.”

He nodded.

“What happened next?”

“She asked if I could … if I remembered her.”

Heloise closed her eyes and put her face in her hands. She knew that she could no longer escape hearing him talk about it. If she wanted the story to be over—both Anna’s and her own—she was going to have to let her father share details from the parallel life that she had been trying for four years to forget he had lived.

She looked up again. “She asked if you remembered her?”

“Yes.”

“And did you?”

“Not to begin with. But later, after we had talked a little more, then yes. Then I remembered.”

“What did you remember?”

He looked up to his right and closed his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them again, he said, “It was in the early nineties. There were a few of us who met occasionally and … exchanged stories.”

“Stories?”

“Yes, anecdotes. And pictures and that sort of thing. That was before the internet, before all the fancy cameras that exist today, where everything is available in the blink of an eye. Everything was analog back then. We had actual film, negatives, processed photos that were swapped around.”

“Who were the people you were meeting with?”

“There were a bunch of different people, depending on the event.” He shrugged. “Just ordinary people.”

Heloise snorted. “Ordinary?”