Jean-Luc stops my hand. His eyes are glassy. “You know. Just in case no one has ever said this to you out loud: it’s not your fault. That they died.”

“Excuse me?”

He ignores my amused expression and, instead, he waits. Watching me. Attempting to force a response from the heavy silence that falls like a morose curtain between us. Amusement shifts to irritation; what kind of response is that, to a confession like mine? I’m split between anger and a desire to believe his words.

The former wins out. “I’m aware, thanks. Is this a part of your bitch duties now, psychoanalyzing me?” I lower my gaze and stare at the gift he gave me seconds before. Whereas the action seemed so thoughtful and generous then, providing my sister’s essays now comes off as presumptuous, boundary crossing, and inappropriately intimate. He doesn’t even try to argue.

“I’ve never lost anyone, not like a sibling,” he says, slowly. “My relationship with my parents isn’t great, but I can go visit them an hour away in Rouen if I want. However, guilt, I know. Growing up in a small town in Normandy, I got into some . . . trouble. My friend and I, Benoît, were pretty aimless. We were classic bourgeois kids—bored, with money we stole from our parents.” He pauses. I look up, and he’s staring at the table’s checkered design.

“We started experimenting with hard drugs. Pot turned to cocaine, which for a split second turned to heroin. Benoît overdosed. The hospital was able to reverse the effects, and he pulled through the longest night of my life, but with consequences. He lost some cognitive ability while he was unconscious, before the paramedics came. Now he lives at home, going from one dead-end job to the next. While I play tour guide to attractive foreigners in Paris.” Jean-Luc exhales the words slowly, like they might detonate in his mouth.

“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry,” I murmur, wishing I had something more meaningful to add.

He turns to me, angling his body in the tight space. The bustle of the restaurant resumes with a roar, breaking my focus on the tremor of his voice, the rise and fall of his chest. He musters a smile that stops at the apples of his cheeks. “It took me years to really understand that it wasn’t my fault. Even though I’m complicit because Benoît and I did that together—I’ll always be part of that story—sometimes, awful things happen. What we do with that knowledge is what counts. You know?”