‘I’m sorry I didn’t manage to call you earlier,’ Valérie went on.

‘That’s all right. It’s not a big deal.’

‘Something amazing happened tonight.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yes, I can’t believe it. And I think it might be thanks to you.’

‘What happened?’

‘It’s Patrick …’

‘What?’

‘I still can’t believe it. It’s … it’s … I don’t have the words …’

‘Tell me.’

‘Well, I should probably start at the beginning, with what happened last night.’

‘Yes, okay,’ I said, trying not to show my impatience. I was so eager to find out about this mysterious event.

She began with the moment when I was standing on the dark landing outside their apartment door. The children had gone back to bed, and Valérie had taken a duvet from a cupboard and thrown it on the sofa. After twenty-five years of married life, this was the first time Patrick had been banished from the conjugal bed. It was a worrying sign. The ‘separate rooms’ stage often comes just before the ‘separate lives’ stage. In shock, he obeyed without a word. He knew he’d gone too far; he’d been incapable of controlling his aggression towards me. And yet, he wasn’t generally someone who lost his temper. He wasn’t the irascible type at all. In fact, you could even describe him as mild-mannered, quite reserved sometimes. His sudden rage that night, then, was completely out of character. Not that that made it any less intolerable in his wife’s eyes. Valérie didn’t want to talk to him any more. Not then, nor ever again. What had happened was the last straw for an already fragile relationship. How could he do such a thing? He’d shamed her, and shame is an emotion that does not fade easily. Even worse: he’d done it in the presence of a witness and their own children. When suffering turns to hysteria, that’s one thing, but it has to remain private, invisible to others. So, yes, he had crossed more than one line.

She was brooding on all this in their double bed when she heard the door open. ‘Go away. I told you I didn’t want to talk to you. Leave me alone …’ But Patrick just stood there, wild-eyed in the doorway. He murmured something, too quiet to hear. As if he were speaking the secret language of silence. Valérie was furious at this half-hearted entrance; if you were going to burst into someone’s room to beg for their forgiveness, you could at least speak up. And that was when she noticed something surprising: tears. Valérie stared at her husband’s face. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him like that before. Patrick hadn’t cried since one of his friends died in a car accident in 1997. Although she couldn’t explain why, this made a drastic difference to her state of mind. Yes, it was true: those few drops of salty water falling from her husband’s eyes radically altered the situation, and maybe even her life.

He walked towards her, still crying. For the first time, he’d realised that he might lose the woman he loved; a mortal wound to his future happiness. The prospect of a night spent on the sofa was a premonition of the loneliness to come. And that destroyed him. So he let out what he’d been keeping locked inside for months. Everything he’d suffered at work came bursting out too. But the most important thing in his life was Valérie. He loved her, he knew he loved her, and he also knew how cruelly incapable he’d been of showing her that recently. It is often only when you are on the verge of losing someone or something that you truly understand how much they mean to you. His wife’s voice and expression when she ordered him to sleep on the sofa had been like an electric shock for Patrick. He couldn’t lose her. And the tears had come. Tears that kept pouring uncontrollably from his eyes.