Deep inside, I’d always known this day would come. For twenty-five years, I’d lived—or tried to live—with this sword of Damocles hanging over my head. Sometimes, in the dead of night, I’d wake up in a cold sweat thinking about what had happened back then and about the prospect that one day someone would find out. On nights like that, I’d pop a bromazepam and wash it down with a Karuizawa single malt, but I rarely managed to get back to sleep.

“We have to do something,” my old friend said again.

I knew he was kidding himself. The bomb that was now threatening to blow our lives apart was one that we had built ourselves one night in 1992.

We both knew there was no way to defuse it.

2.

After locking the car door, I walked toward the gas station. There was a sort of American drugstore there that everyone called Dino’s place. Behind the gas pumps was a colonial-style clapboard building with a small shop and a nice café with a large terrace sheltered by an awning.

I pushed open the swinging door. The place hadn’t really changed. At the back of the shop, a few high stools were set around a painted wooden counter lined with colorful cakes under glass domes. The rest of the room was filled with benches and tables that extended out onto the terrace. The walls were hung with vintage enamel signs for long-defunct brands and posters of the Riviera in the 1920s. To squeeze in more people, the owners had gotten rid of the pool table and the arcade games—Out Run, Arkanoid, Street Fighter II—that used to guzzle my pocket money. Only the foosball table had survived, an old Bonzini competition model, its paint now peeling and chipped. I couldn’t resist stroking the heavy beech frame—this was where Maxime and I had spent hours replaying the great Olympique de Marseille matches. A slew of random images came to me: Papin’s hat trick in the ’89 Coupe de France; Vata’s hand ball against Benfica; Chris Waddle’s left-foot goal against AC Milan the night when the floodlights in the Vélodrome suddenly went out. Sadly, we didn’t celebrate the long-awaited victory—winning the 1993 UEFA Champions League—together. By then, I’d already left the Côte d’Azur to go to business school in Paris.

I let the atmosphere of the café wash over me. Maxime hadn’t been the only person I came here with after school. My most vivid memories were of Vinca Rockwell, the girl I was in love with back then, the girl every boy was in love with back then. It was only yesterday. It was a lifetime ago.