Clotilde was late. But she stopped for a minute, just before going on down to Oscelluccia beach. A few seconds to go back in time. It was the same sand as twenty-seven years ago, the same pebbles, the same foam, the same spray mixed with the pungent, peppery smell of the flowers nestling in the hollows of the rocks. Nothing had changed if you didn’t look towards the Tropi-Kalliste beach hut or the building site of the Roc e Mare marina. Something keeled over in her heart, rocking it like a boat unsettled by the swell.

My God, but Natale was handsome.

He just had to be there, he had to be sitting there scanning the horizon with his lagoon-blue eyes, his eyes that could detonate all the coral reefs in the world, allowing the triggerfish and clownfish to escape so they could add colour and make the oceans laugh.

Natale was wearing a salmon-coloured sweat-shirt with a hood. A pair of jeans that were slightly too big for him. Leather sandals. Clotilde imagined that he might often pose like this, like a statue; that he had retained from his abandoned dreams the magical power to transform reality, for a few fleeting seconds, into something more beautiful inside his head. That he had learned to settle for that. To turn the fish counter at the Super-U in Lumio into an inviolate marine sanctuary. The Cour Napoléon road in Ajaccio, car pressed against car, into a one-man transatlantic crossing. A hasty clinch in darkness with the woman who falls asleep by his side every evening, into a starry night of love with one of the passers-by he bumped into earlier that day. One of the passengers who had boarded the Aryon in the old days.

Handsome. Solid. Fragile.

‘Natale?’

She had slipped on a lilac dress that floated against her thighs. She had slipped off her sandals to walk on the sand that was still cold, almost damp.

He turned around, his eyes fixed on hers.

Handsome. Solid. Fragile.

Dangerous.

Nothing could be more dangerous than men with lagoon-blue eyes, Clotilde thought to herself. Blowing up the reef also meant letting in all the sea monsters, which might enter the protected space where families paddled in safety.

They advanced towards one another, without crossing the final metre that separated them.

‘You’re playing with fire, asking to meet me here,’ Natale said. ‘I had promised never to set foot on this beach again.’

‘There were a lot of other things you promised too.’

He didn’t reply. His eye slipped to the Aryon, still moored to the rocks.

‘You were lucky. I’m free today. I’m not due back at work until tomorrow morning.’

Clotilde pinched her lips.