Then I went down the steps and joined my mother, Maxime, and his daughters on the lawn. The first thing I noticed was the thick file under his arm. I shot him a quizzical look.

“We’ll talk later,” he whispered, reaching for a bag containing a stuffed dog and a rubber giraffe on the back seat.

He introduced me to his children, two bouncing little girls with dazzling smiles, and for a few minutes, thanks to their antics, we were able to forget our troubles. Emma and Louise were funny and utterly delightful. From the way my mother treated them—and the way my father did when he eventually joined us—I realized that Maxime was a regular visitor to the house. Seeing my parents playing the role of grandparents was charming if faintly ridiculous and, for a moment, it occurred to me that Maxime had filled the vacuum in the family that I left when I moved away. But I did not feel bitter. On the contrary, I felt that it was all the more important to protect him from what we had done.

After about fifteen minutes, my mother took the girls into the kitchen to help her make the apricot tart—the secret ingredient was lavender seeds sprinkled over the fruit—and my father went back up to watch the Giro d’Italia.

“Right,” I said to Maxime. “Time for a council of war.”

2.

The place I loved most in the Villa Violette was the stone-and-timber pool house my parents had built as soon as they moved here. With an outdoor kitchen, a patio, and a canopy, it looked like a home within a home. It was my favorite spot, one where I had spent countless hours reading, curled up on the canvas sofa.

I sat down at the teak table under the arbor overgrown with Virginia creeper. Maxime sat next to me.

I didn’t beat around the bush—I told him what Fanny had revealed, that, as Ahmed was dying and feeling the need to salve his conscience, he had told her how, on Francis’s orders, he had walled up the body of Alexis Clément in the gym. If he had told Fanny, he might have told others. This was hardly good news, but at least it meant that we knew the identity of the traitor. Well, maybe not exactly a traitor, but the person responsible for our past coming back to haunt us.

“Ahmed died in November. If he’d talked to the cops, they would have had all the time in the world to x-ray the gym walls for a corpse,” Maxime said.

Although his face was still lined with worry, he seemed less overwhelmed than he had been this morning, more in control of his emotions.

“Agreed. But he must have told someone else. What about you? How did things go down at the station?”