“We’ve been monitoring her since the minor heart attack, but it’s all good,” Fanny said reassuringly.

I was completely taken aback. “Me and my mother…well, it’s complicated,” I said evasively.

“That’s what all boys say, isn’t it?” she said, then let the subject drop. Fanny pointed out another teacher. “Now, she was cool!” she said.

It took me a moment to recognize Miss DeVille, an American who taught English literature to those preparing for the Grandes Écoles.

“And she’s still a knockout too!” Fanny whispered. “She looks like Catherine Zeta-Jones!”

Miss DeVille was a good five feet eleven inches and had long straight hair that fell to her shoulders. She was wearing high heels, tight leather pants, and a collarless jacket. Her lithe, svelte figure made her look younger than some of her former students. How old had she been when she first came to Saint-Ex? Twenty-five? Thirty at most. She had never taught me but I remembered that her students were very fond of her, and some of the boys all but worshipped her.

For a few minutes, Fanny and I continued spying on our former classmates and reminiscing. As I listened to her talk, I was reminded why I’d always liked her. She radiated a sort of positive energy, and she had a sense of humor, which was always a bonus. But she hadn’t had an easy start in life. Her mother, a pretty, blond, olive-skinned woman with eyes that could be either tender or lethal, worked as an assistant in a clothes shop on the Croisette in Cannes. When Fanny was in second grade, her mother had walked out on her husband and three children and run off to South America with her boss. Before becoming a boarder at Saint-Ex, Fanny and her brothers had lived for nearly a decade with their father, who’d been paralyzed in an accident on a construction site. The four of them lived in a run-down housing project on the boulevard du Val Claret—not the sort of place mentioned in guidebooks to Antibes Juan-les-Pins.

Fanny delivered a few more stinging but good-natured barbs (“Good to see Étienne Labitte still looks like a dickhead”), then stared at me, a curious smile playing on her lips. “Life might have reassigned certain roles to others, but you’re still the same as ever.” She snapped a picture of me with the Leica and continued, “Top of the class, preppy, clean-cut in your flannel jacket and your nice blue shirt.”

“Coming from you, I’m pretty sure that’s not a compliment.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Girls only go for bad boys, don’t they?”

“At sixteen, maybe. Not when they’ve turned forty!”

I shrugged, squinting and shading my eyes with my hand.

“Looking for someone?”

“Maxime.”