This is what she said. Word for word. I didn’t want to sleep with him. That bastard Alexis Clément had forced himself on her.

I jumped up from the bed, determined to do something. “I’ll fix this,” I said, heading for the door. “I’ll come back and see you later.” As I left, I almost bumped into Fanny arriving with the tea tray.

Though I did not know it then, I had just told two lies. I would not “fix this”; I would make things much worse. And I would not go back and see Vinca. Or, rather, by the time I came back, she would be gone for good.

6.

Outside, the snow had stopped, but steel-gray clouds lowered over the scene. The sky was dark, oppressive, a foretaste of the gathering night.

I had raced out of Vinca’s room furious and sickened by what she had told me, determined to rescue her. At last, everything made sense. Alexis was a fraud and a rapist. Vinca still cared about me, and she had turned to me when she needed help.

The teachers’ residence was close by. As an on-campus teacher at Saint-Ex, Alexis Clément was entitled to housing in the small building that overlooked the lake. To get there, I had to cut through the construction site where the new gym was being built. The foundations, the cement mixers, the half-finished walls were all but buried by a thick layer of pristine snow.

I deliberated over my choice of weapon and eventually picked up a crowbar a builder had left in a wheelbarrow next to a pile of sand. I can’t pretend that what I did was not premeditated. Something was stirring in me, an ancient, primal violence that spurred me on. It is something I have felt only once in my life.

To this day, I still remember the intoxicating air that trilled through me. I was no longer an asthmatic student grumbling about a math problem—I was a warrior, a soldier marching to the front lines. By the time I reached the teachers’ building, night had almost fallen. Far off, the dark waters of the lake shimmered with the reflected sky.

In the daytime—even on weekends—it was possible to access the building without a key. Like the student dorms, the building was cold, silent, lifeless. Doggedly, I climbed the stairs. I knew I would find Alexis Clément there because I had heard my mother take a call from him earlier saying that his flight home to Munich had been canceled.

I pounded on the door of his room. Inside, a radio was playing. When Alexis opened the door, he suspected nothing.

“Oh—hey, Thomas!”

He looked like Cédric Pioline, a hulking French tennis pro with long, dark, curly hair. Alexis had a good four inches on me, and he was much brawnier, but in that moment, I was not intimidated by him.