I got caught up on the entire family, even the witches downstairs who still hadn’t forgiven Mathieu, who’d even had the gall to complain about the noise Sébastien made when he ran through the house. (After two visits! What would it be like after months or years?) For a brief moment I felt nostalgic for the time, actually so recent although it felt so distant now, when I was the only man among these women whom I adored, protected from the ugliness I encountered during my nocturnal peregrinations by their healthiness, their level-headedness, their humour.

And then an image of making love with Mathieu appeared and washed away my nostalgia. I’d turned a corner, Mathieu was now my absolute priority, and I just needed to find a way to link these two poles of my life which, up till now, had merely grazed each other without really merging: the security of a family that we’d created ourselves, based on indissoluble friendships, and my life with Mathieu, a life that was more intimate and more exclusive.

I watched Mélène go back and forth in the kitchen she hated so much and my heart swelled with a love very ­different from the one I felt for Mathieu, but which was truly love, I was certain of that. I wished I could tell her, but how can you say “I love you” to a friend and not sound pompous or risk offending her sense of propriety—or your own? For a couple, love is declared with great exclamations and very specific acts; between friends, love is more delicate, something that with time may even become nebulous: one must learn to decode words and acts, while knowing that the other person is doing the same, and in the end everything becomes comfortable, taken for granted.