Discovering the letters left me traumatized. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I was broken, overwhelmed by an anguish that drove me mad. My teachers and my family were concerned by my plummeting grades. When my mother grilled me about it, I had no choice but to tell her why I was so crushed—I confessed my feelings for Vinca and told her about the letters I’d found. She coldly responded that no girl was worth ruining my education over and told me to pull myself together.

I sensed that I would never really crawl from the abyss into which I had fallen. At the time I couldn’t possibly have known that the real nightmare lay ahead.

To be honest, I could see why Vinca was attracted to Clément. He’d taught me the year before, and although I personally found him shallow, I had to admit he looked the part of a lover. It was hardly a fair fight, given my age. In the blue corner, Alexis Clément, twenty-seven, devilishly handsome, tennis pro, driving an Alpine A310 and quoting Schopenhauer in the original German; in the red corner, Thomas Degalais, eighteen, slogging away at a math course, all of seventy francs in pocket money a week, riding a Peugeot 103 moped (without even a souped-up engine), and spending his scant free time playing Kick Off on his Atari ST.

I never thought of Vinca as mine. But Vinca was made for me, just as I was made for her. I was convinced that I was the right person for her, even if this was not the right time. I felt that the day would come when I would have my revenge on guys like Alexis Clément, though it might be years before the tables were turned. And while I waited for that day, my mind was flooded with images of her sleeping with this man. It was unbearable.

When the phone rang that Saturday afternoon in December, I was home alone. The day before, the official start of the vacation, my father had flown to Papeete with my sister and brother. My paternal grandparents had been living in Tahiti for about ten years and we visited them every other Christmas. This year, I had decided to stay home to tackle my falling grades. My mother had decided to spend Christmas in the Landes with her sister Giovanna, who was slowly recovering from major surgery. She was planning to go the next day, and right now she was overseeing the whole campus, manning the tiller of the storm-tossed ship.