Our phone had been ringing all morning because of the snowstorm. In those days, there were no salt spreaders or snowplows to clear the roads of Sophia Antipolis. My mother had been called in to deal with an emergency—a delivery truck had skidded on the icy road and was blocking the gate next to the caretaker’s lodge. In despair, she had turned for help to Maxime’s father, Francis Biancardini, and he had promised to come as quickly as possible.

I picked up the ringing phone, assuming it was another emergency or maybe Maxime calling to cancel our plans. We usually met up at Dino’s on Saturday afternoons to play foosball, watch videos, and swap CDs, or sometimes we’d hang around outside McDonald’s in the Carrefour parking lot on our mopeds before heading home to watch the soccer highlights on Jour de Foot.

“Thomas, can you come over, please?”

I felt a pang in my heart. It was not Maxime—it was Vinca, sounding slightly choked. I had assumed she’d flown back to Boston to be with her family, but she said that she was still at Saint-Ex, that she wasn’t feeling well, and that she wanted to see me.

I was all too conscious of the fact that, when it came to Vinca, I was completely pathetic. Every time she called, every time she spoke to me, hope surged anew and I rushed off to be with her. Which was what I did then, cursing my weakness and my nonexistent self-respect, wishing I had the moral courage to pretend not to care.

5.

The predicted late-afternoon thaw was taking its time to arrive. It was bitterly cold, and the mistral whipped the powdery snow into eddies. In my haste, I’d forgotten to wear boots, and my Air Maxes sank into the snow. Wrapped up in my fleece jacket and hunched against the wind, I looked like Jeremiah Johnson in pursuit of a ghostly grizzly bear. Despite my best efforts, and though the student dorms were only a stone’s throw from my parents’ apartment, it took me almost ten minutes to reach the Nicolas de Staël building, its blue faded to a gray spectral mass in the iridescent mist.

The building was cold and deserted. The sliding doors leading to the students’ common room had been closed off. I kicked the snow from my shoes and took the stairs four at a time. I knocked on Vinca’s door several times. When there was no answer, I pushed it open and stepped into a room that smelled of vanilla and benzoin, the characteristic perfume of Armenian paper incense.