Clotilde remembered a Natale who drove her crazy. An inaccessible fantasy for her fifteen-year-old self. Today, she had discovered a fragile man. All of his dreams shattered. Misunderstood. Misloved. Mismarried.

But still free, all in all.

Still free! From the depths of her bed, Clotilde found the expression paradoxical. Natale was still free because a woman had stolen his freedom. She laughed gently to herself. Basically, all lovers steal freedom. They dream of finding Prince Charming, only to lock him up in a basement.

She placed the phone on the bedside table and fell back into a doze, rolling herself up in the warm, damp blankets.

How much time had passed when Franck’s voice made her jump?

‘Thanks for breakfast.’

More than half an hour.

Clotilde woke up with a start and accepted Franck’s kiss on her forehead. Sweat against sweat, Franck’s from his efforts to jog up to Notre-Dame de la Serra, and Clotilde’s from lounging in her oven.

She struggled to imagine the reason for this rare kiss.

Thanks for breakfast.

She got to her feet in surprise.

The table was laid.

Fresh bread, croissants, coffee, tea, honey. Fruit juice and jams.

Franck? Had Franck laid the table to impress her? Was his ‘Thanks for breakfast’ an ironic formula to make her get up? Her husband, the bold athlete, shaking the lazy slugabed?

Clotilde’s eyes fell on the mobile phone beside the bed and she felt a tremor of guilt.

Don’t spoil everything.

She kissed Franck’s neck.

‘Thank you.’

Franck looked surprised.

‘For what?’

‘This perfect breakfast. The only thing missing is a rose in a single-stem vase.’

Franck was totally flummoxed.

‘It wasn’t you?’

‘No, I was asleep.’

‘And I’ve only just got here.’

Their baffled eyes moved simultaneously to the door of their daughter’s room.

Valou?

That she should have performed this gesture for her parents seemed harder to imagine than a discrete intervention by house elves. Franck received confirmation of this in the form of a grunt from beyond the grave as soon as he pulled open the curtain in the girl’s bedroom.

Not Valou, not Franck, not her …

Who then?

Clotilde put on a shirt and studied the table, troubled by details that she hadn’t noticed at first. There weren’t three bowls, three sets of cutlery and napkins on the little camping table, there were four. But the number was unimportant compared to the other coincidences.

Franck came out of Valentine’s room, and Clotilde pointed to a glass of pink juice and the white bowl placed beside it.

‘Nicolas always sat there, at the end of the table. He always had a grapefruit juice and a bowl of milk for breakfast.’

Franck didn’t reply, so Clotilde went on, indicating a cup and a coffee-pot that were both still steaming hot.

‘Papa sat opposite him, there. He had a black coffee.’

A teapot, two teabags.