Dazed with shock, I studied the pictures in more detail. They were all much the same. Not for a second did it occur to me that they might be faked. Deep down, I knew the scenes captured in these images had taken place. Maybe some part of me was not entirely surprised. It felt like a secret I had never been told but that was nonetheless buried deep in my subconscious.

My father was in every photograph. Richard Degalais, known as “Richard the Lionheart” or simply “Rick.” Back in the early nineties, he had been around the same age I was now. I did not take after my father. He was elegant, distinguished. In the photos, he was slim with shoulder-length hair, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his chest. Rakishly handsome, silver-tongued, a gambler and a roué, my father was not so different from Alexis Clément except that he was fifteen years his senior. He loved beautiful women, sports cars, classic cigarette lighters, and Smalto jackets. It was depressing to admit, but in the pictures, he and Vinca made quite a couple.

The photos had been taken in at least two different locations. The first I immediately recognized as Saint-Paul de Vence, out of season—the Café de la Place, the old oil mill, the city walls overlooking the countryside, the old cemetery where Marc Chagall lies buried. In the photos, Vinca and my father were strolling hand in hand, and there could be no doubt that they were in a romantic relationship. The second location was more difficult to identify. At first, the only thing I could make out was my father’s Audi 80 convertible parked on a hard shoulder that was surrounded by gleaming white boulders. A set of steps was carved into the rock. In the distance, a steep island glittered like quartz. The penny dropped: Les Calanques at Marseille. The sheltered cove behind the embankment was the beach near the Baie des Singes, a secluded spot where my father had taken us many times as a family and that, apparently, also served as a setting for his secret trysts.

My mouth was dry. Although I felt disgusted, I studied the pictures as closely as possible. There was something artistic, something creative about them. Who had sent me these photos? Who had taken them? Back then, zoom lenses had been much more primitive; in order to capture this much detail, the photographer would have had to be close to his subjects, so close that, for a moment, I wondered whether the shots could really have been taken without their knowing. It seemed clear that my father had not known he was being photographed, but what about Vinca?