Chapitre quatorze

Two blurry days later, it’s a feeling of falling that wakes me up. Or maybe it’s the incessant beeping of my alarm. I’m not sure what I was dreaming about, but as I pull my mask from my eyes, a hologram of Sabine standing in that doorway videoing us is branded on my mind’s eye. I reach for my phone, turn off my alarm, and check the time. It’s 7.20 am and there’s one message from a dating app on the screen. Nee-koh-lah. Hey beautiful, want to catch up tonight? X.

Finally, a question I know the answer to: No.

I groan, pull out my earplugs, and try to stand up but my brain is fuzzy and my tongue is thick; I couldn’t sleep last night so I took another one of Anne’s Ambiens. Now I’m dizzy and late and as I move through to the kitchen, I can smell orange blossom coming from my wrist. Because yesterday I went with Nathalie to try out that perfume mixing place in Le Marais. It was four hours of pure hell: lots of smiling and nodding and pretending to care what oud smelled like while surreptitiously checking my phone while nobody was looking. Then last night was spent at the laundromat, listening to the whirr of my washing spinning around the dryer as I scrolled through pages and pages of social media posts – the whole of Paris seemed keen to claim the missing girl now – and watched and re-watched every video on Sabine’s Vimeo page, looking for god knows what. All I found were stolen snippets from her daily life: a busker counting his money in le Bois de Boulogne; a group of students huddling together and checking for onlookers, at what looked like her art school; Agnès Bisset talking to a tall, willowy potential buyer; and an elderly couple walking hand in hand outside Sacré-Cœur. But nothing to tell me what happened to Sabine.

Now today is Thursday, and she’s still gone.

I flick on the kettle and stare out the window because I know what that means. Sabine has been gone since last Friday, that’s six days, long past the seventy-two hours where the likelihood of finding her alive is high.

I swallow hard and warm my hands on the side of the kettle and my phone buzzes from the countertop: a private number. I stare at it: this happened yesterday too. But nobody calls from an unmarked number unless it’s a telemarketer, so I press the red button and send it to voicemail.

The kettle boils. I make my coffee and take a sip. My tongue recoils. It’s strong. And as my eyes return to the sky outside, I can’t help thinking of what Camilla said when I called her to tell her Sabine was missing last night: Come home.