Your mother got behind the wheel of the Renault Alpine and we set off. I rolled down my window and waved to the caretaker as he raised the barrier; I waved to the two guys collecting garbage by the traffic circle. When we got to the Antibes train station, we discovered that, in order to make up for trains canceled the day before, the SNCF had added another fast train to Paris. Your mother bought the tickets. The journey to Paris passed like a breath. I wandered through every carriage so that I would be seen, so that passengers would remember me, but I never stayed in one place for long. When we arrived, your mother told me she’d chosen that hotel on the rue de Saint-Simon because she’d stayed there six months earlier and because the elderly night watchman was a little senile and would be easy to dupe. We got there at about ten o’clock and asked if we could pay for the room in advance, saying we needed to leave very early in the morning. We left just enough clues to make it seem as though Vinca had really been there. I was the one who came up with the idea of ordering Cherry Coke. Your mother had the idea of “forgetting” the toiletry bag with the hairbrush that had Vinca’s DNA on it.

And do you want to know what was really insane? That day—I had to drink two beers and take a Rohypnol to get to sleep—was probably the most exhilarating of my whole life.

*  *  *

The comedown was as brutal as the excitement had been thrilling. By the following morning, everything was once again bleak and terrifying. The moment I woke up, I nearly had a breakdown. I couldn’t imagine myself getting through another day dragging around this terrible weight of guilt and self-loathing. But I had promised your mother I would see it through. I’d already ruined my own life; I wasn’t going to bring her down with me.

We left the hotel at dawn and took the Métro, line 12 from rue du Bac to Concorde, then line 1 to the Gare de Lyon. Annabelle handed me my ticket back to Nice and told me she was heading to Montparnasse to take a later train to her sister’s in the Landes.

In a café outside the station, she warned me that there would be worse days ahead while I learned to live with what I had done and immediately added that she knew that I could do it because, like her, I was a fighter, and fighters were the only people she respected.