I woke up late the day after the murder. The night before, I had popped two sleeping pills I’d found in the family medicine cabinet. That morning, the house was empty and freezing cold. My mother had set off before dawn for the Landes and at some point a fuse had blown, so the radiators were not working. Still groggy, I spent a quarter of an hour tinkering with the fuse box before I managed to get the electricity going again.

In the kitchen on the door of the fridge, I found a little note from my mother, who had made me some French toast. Outside the window, the sunlight glittering on the snow made me feel as though I were in Isola 2000, the ski resort in Mercantour where Francis had a chalet to which he invited us most winters.

Reflexively, I turned the radio on to France Info. Overnight, I had become a murderer, but the world was still turning—massacres in Sarajevo, starving Somali children, bloody clashes at the match between Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique de Marseille. I made some black coffee and wolfed down the French toast. I was a murderer, but I was ravenous.

In the bathroom, I stayed in the shower for half an hour and threw up everything I had just eaten. I scrubbed myself with soap as I had the night before, but it felt as though Alexis Clément’s blood were caked on my face, my lips, my skin. And as though it would be there forever.

After a while, overcome by the scalding steam, I almost fainted. I was twitchy, my neck felt stiff, my legs were shaky, my belly burned from regurgitated acid. My mind was overwhelmed. Unable to face the situation, I felt my thoughts slither away. It had to stop. I could not keep going as though nothing had happened. When I stepped out of the shower, I had decided to go to the police station and come clean, but I changed my mind at the last minute; if I confessed, I would bring down Maxime and his family, people who had helped me, who had risked everything for me. Eventually, to keep fear from engulfing me completely, I pulled on a tracksuit and went out running.

2.

I ran around the lake three times, sprinting until I was exhausted. The whole world was silvery with frost. I was fascinated by this snowy scene. For as long as I cleaved through the air, I felt as though I was at one with nature, as though the trees, the snow, the wind were assimilating me into their crystalline cortex. All around me, everything was luminous and infinite. An icy parenthesis, an unspoiled, almost unreal territory. The blank page on which I once again believed I might write the next chapters of my life.