He confessed that he had been having an affair with Alexis DeVille for months, that his wife had found out about the affair and gone to see his mistress armed with a rifle, that Alexis, feeling her life was threatened, had killed my mother, and that he, in turn, had killed her. It was a plausible scenario. It gave each of the central characters a clear and credible motive. Its chief advantage was in portraying the murders as crimes of passion. My father’s lawyer was positively ecstatic at the prospect of a trial. The brutality of my mother’s murder, Alexis DeVille’s history of mental illness, to say nothing of her setting her vicious dogs on me, made my father’s actions look like justifiable homicide, and while they would not lead to an acquittal, they made a lenient sentence more likely. Most of all, framing the murders as crimes of passion meant that there was no connection to the disappearances of Vinca and Clément.

But it all seemed too good to be true.

*  *  *

For a few weeks, I thought that fortune might continue to smile on us. Maxime had woken up from his coma and his condition quickly improved. In June, he was elected to Parliament, and his name was often mentioned in the press as a potential minister. The investigation into the attack on Maxime meant that the area surrounding the gym was a crime scene, so the demolition could not proceed according to schedule. Then at a board meeting of the Hutchinson and DeVille Foundation, it was decided, given the circumstances, to withdraw the proposed endowment to the Lycée Saint-Exupéry, and the project was shelved indefinitely. The school governors instantly put forward a rationale entirely at odds with their previous stance. Citing environmental and cultural reasons, the governors of Saint-Ex insisted that to build on a site of such natural beauty would threaten the very soul of the landscape they cherished.

*  *  *

Fanny called me when the news broke that my father had been arrested. We met up at the hospital and spent hours by the bedside of the still-unconscious Maxime, teasing out the truth of what had happened that night in 1992. The revelation that she had not been responsible for Vinca’s death made it possible for Fanny to finally get on with her life. Not long afterward, she split up with Thierry Sénéca and got in touch with a fertility clinic in Barcelona to discuss IVF. After Maxime regained consciousness, Fanny and I often met in his room at the hospital.

For a time, I truly believed that the three of us might escape the tragic fate to which the bodies walled up in the gym should have condemned us. For a time, I truly believed we had managed to overcome the curse of the nice guys.

But I had not reckoned on betrayal by the man I had mistakenly trusted: Stéphane Pianelli.

*  *  *