“What have your brilliant father and your genius brother been telling you now? I was at the next table, talking with your mother, and we weren’t paying attention to you . . . You were so loud we didn’t want people to know we were with you . . . We thought you were fighting over some hockey game. Every table in Da Giovanni stopped eating so they could listen to you!”

“What it is, they’re starting to talk . . . Apparently my sister and Mum aren’t taking it so hard, but the rest of them . . .”

“Your brothers and your father are just a bunch of machos . . .”

“That’s right, they’re flat-out macho and they’ve got big mouths, and you better believe it!”

Louise propped herself on one elbow, her head very close to Gaston’s. Her lovely profile, that of a child who’s grown too quickly, had always moved him. A wisp of hair had fallen onto her forehead. He brushed it aside with a gesture so familiar that she felt as if she’d known Gaston forever. She pressed her nose against his shoulder. Made her voice more gentle.

“What’re you trying to tell me?”

He put his arms around her and held her very tight; guessing that what he was about to say would be painful, she shut her eyes.

“Pa and my brothers, especially Paulot who didn’t mince his words, they’re trying to put it in my mother’s head that it could be dangerous for Sébastien . . . See, Jean-Marc’s homosexual, and Sébastien’s a little boy . . .”

She sprang up as if he’d slapped her. She threw back the covers and leapt out of bed, then, realizing she couldn’t tell him off while she was walking around the bed or pacing the floor and he was looking on from his pillows, she resumed her place, seething with fury.

“You pigs! Tell those brilliant brothers of yours, especially that genius Paulot, that if I had a little girl Sébastien’s age I wouldn’t let her near them—for the same goddamn ­reasons! They act a lot more like sex maniacs than Jean-Marc and Mathieu!”