Those who have something to protect forget about everything else, Thomas said. To each his own. Nobody takes care of anyone except for their own people.

But it didn’t help that he talked, it didn’t help that I tried to listen. It didn’t help that we worked as hard as we could. It didn’t help that France had approved the construction of three new plants.

That’s how quickly things can change. One day you wake up to the sound of the alarm clock, eat breakfast, go to work, argue, laugh, make love, do the dishes, worry about your bank account being drained before the end of the month. . . . You don’t think about how everything you have around you can disappear. Even if you hear that the world is changing. Even if you notice it on the thermometer. You don’t think about it until the day when it’s no longer the alarm clock that wakes you up in the morning, but the sound of screams. The flames have reached your city, your house, your bed, your loved ones. Your house is in flames, your bedclothes catch fire, your pillow starts smoking and you can’t do anything but run.

“Salt is death,” Thomas said. “Salt kills.”

Toward the end, before we had to leave everything behind, I was often allowed to borrow his battered plastic boat. I would take it out on the ocean by myself, tell Anna I was going fishing, even though it was seldom possible to catch anything any longer. After docking the boat, I used to stand on the beach with my feet in the water, the water that rose slowly and relentlessly. And that was exactly what I thought: Salt is death. This ocean is death. It is rising and spreading its salt everywhere. And then I closed my eyes and prayed to a god I didn’t believe in, prayed that when I opened my eyes again and stuck my hand in the water, the ocean would have become something else. That when I tasted my fingers, it would taste of nothing, the way fresh water does. Clean, clear nothing.

Sometimes I would stand there like that for a long while. But I never tried to taste my fingers. I just clung to the thought, to the idea that the water of the rising ocean would one day be fresh.

I squeezed Lou’s hand a little harder, out of a need to confirm that she was still there. We had walked quite a distance now. I turned around, could just make out the contours of the camp fence far behind us.

“Look there,” I said to Lou. “It’s nice here.”

A shadowy lane appeared on our left, with tall trees on both sides. We continued walking down it, beneath the trees. The temperature dropped several degrees. Lou must have felt it, that it was pleasant walking here, because now she was walking faster.

We walked around a bend. I turned my head and could no longer see the highway behind us. Ahead of us there was another bend in the road. I liked that we were alone here. That there was no longer any trace of the refugee camp. That I could pretend that we were just an ordinary father and daughter, out for a walk on an ordinary road, in an ordinary world. Like before.