Madame Roux returns with the flowers I brought her – yellow chrysanthemums – in a big white vase and puts them down on the large cream doily in the middle of the coffee table. Chrysanthemums. In France, those are the flowers you buy for people when somebody dies. At least, that’s what the flower seller told me when I bought them on the way here this morning, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Mme Roux didn’t seem particularly thrilled when she saw them. But then I handed her that business card, introduced myself as Lors Carron from Le Voltage and told her why I was here. Her eyes softened after that. She let me inside.

She sits down and pours the coffee. A big silver pot and two tiny cups.

It’s always strange to see where someone lives. It tells you so much about them. Often things you’d never guess from meeting them. Like Sabine with her bright red hair and enfant terrible demeanour seems misplaced in the leafy suburbia of Boulogne-Billancourt among the floral throw pillows and doilies. Yet that’s where she lived. Right now, I’m sitting on the sofa she would have sat on many times: a light green and pink paisley. A shiver runs down my spine as though Sabine’s ghost is here, right now, watching me lie to her mother.

The feeling is compounded by the fact Mme Roux looks just like her daughter: though her hair is grey and perfectly coiffed, not red and messy, and her movements are slower. It’s as though she’s weighed down or constricted by a heavy gauze of grief that has wrapped itself around her. A gauze that is bound to only tighten over time.

‘Sabine was so excited about this exhibition,’ she says, pushing my little cup towards me.

That’s what I told her at the door: that we, at Le Voltage, were putting on Sabine’s exhibition. That I needed some information for the flyers. Yes, I’m basically Satan’s little helper, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Because I don’t know how she feels about journalists and I couldn’t risk her not talking to me. So this was all I could think of. How else am I meant to do Sabine justice in my article?