Dumbfounded, I stared at the photograph of the woman everyone had called Miss DeVille. Even the yearbook did not give her first name, only the initials A.C. I had finally found Alexis, the woman who had murdered my mother, killed Francis, and tried to kill Maxime. The woman who, indirectly, had hastened Vinca’s tragic fate.

“She now spends six months of the year on the Côte d’Azur,” Meirieu reported. “She bought the old Fitzgerald villa down in Cap d’Antibes—you know the one I mean?”

I rushed out the door, only to realize that I didn’t have a car. I considered stealing the bamboo bike but instead went down to the basement and pulled the plastic tarpaulin off my old moped. I sat on the saddle and, as I’d done so often when I was fifteen, tried to kick-start the Peugeot 103.

But the basement was cold and damp, and the engine stalled. I ferreted out a toolbox and came back, removed the suppressor cap, and took out the spark plug. It was black and caked with soot. As I’d done a hundred times in the mornings before setting off for school, I wiped the spark plug with an old rag, rubbed it down with sandpaper, and put it back.

I wheeled the moped out into the driveway and tried to kick-start it again. There was a slight improvement, but I couldn’t get the engine to idle. I flipped up the kickstand, jumped on the saddle, and let myself coast downhill. The engine sputtered, coughed, and then backfired and started. I swung onto the main road, praying that it would hold out for a few kilometers.

Richard

Images collide inside my head. Excruciating, unreal. More terrible than the worst nightmares. My wife’s face, crushed, splintered, shattered. Annabelle’s beautiful face reduced to a mask of bloody flesh.

My name is Richard Degalais and I am tired of living.

If life truly is war, I have not just faced an enemy assault, I am lying in the trenches, my belly sliced open by a bayonet. Forced to surrender unconditionally in the most painful of all battles.

I stand motionless in the living room amid the dust motes that glitter golden in the light. My house is empty now. It will forever be empty. I find it difficult to accept the reality of what has happened. I have lost Annabelle forever. But when did I really lose her? A few hours ago on the beach at Cap d’Antibes? A few years ago? A few decades ago? Or it might be better to say that I have not really lost Annabelle, since she was never mine to lose.