It was still raining when I hung up. I huddled under a deserted bus shelter on the place du Général-de-Gaulle while I made two agonizing phone calls, first to my brother and then to my sister, to tell them that our mother was dead. True to form, Jérôme remained stoic, though was clearly deeply upset. The conversation with my sister, however, was surreal. While I had assumed she was in bed with her husband in Paris, she was actually on a weekend trip to Stockholm with her new boyfriend. I didn’t know it, but she had gotten divorced more than a year ago. She told me a little about the divorce and then I told her about the tragedy, though I was vague about the circumstances.

She burst into hysterical sobs and there was nothing that I or the guy in bed next to her could do to calm her.

Afterward, I spent a long time wandering aimlessly around the square while the storm raged. The square was flooded. A pipe had burst and water was gushing up through a hole in the pavement. The floodlit fountains sprayed long golden jets into the darkness, where they mingled with rain to form a mist.

I was soaked to the skin; my heart was broken, my brain fried, my body shattered. It felt as though the thick fog that drowned my footsteps and blotted out the square, the curbs, and the road markings had washed away my moral compass, my every point of reference. I no longer understood my role in this story that had haunted me for so many years. This never-ending fall. This film noir in which I was more victim than hero.

2.

Suddenly, twin headlights pierced the fog and came toward me; it was Stéphane Pianelli’s Dacia.

“Get in, Thomas,” he said, rolling down the window. “I thought maybe you’d have trouble getting home. I’ll drive you.”

Exhausted, I accepted. The passenger seat was still piled high with junk so, as I had earlier, I climbed into the back seat next to the sleeping Ernesto.

Pianelli explained that he was on his way back from the offices of Nice-Matin. Since the paper had been put to bed early in the evening, there would be no mention of my mother’s death in the morning edition, but Stéphane had gone back to the office to write a piece for the online edition.

“I haven’t mentioned anything about your father being suspected,” he said.

As we drove along the coast toward La Fontonne, Pianelli finally admitted that he had run into Fanny earlier in the evening when he had stopped by the hospital to check on Maxime.

“She was a nervous wreck. I’ve never seen her like that.”

Alarm bells started to ring in my frazzled brain. “What did she tell you?”

We had stopped at the intersection near Siesta. The longest traffic light in the world…