Clotilde set her book down on the table, leaving behind the cup of tea that she had barely tasted, as if to suggest that she wasn’t far away. Franck was already snoring.

Gently, silently, she disappeared into the darkness.

~

As she left the Euproctes campsite and followed the deserted path beneath the olive trees, the silence of the campsite quickly made way for the sounds of the night. All the shy and ugly things frightened by the sun were waking up. Fearful wood mice, keen-eyed owls, lascivious toads. Clotilde walked for ten minutes, using the torch on her iPhone, until she reached the beginning of the path that led to the Casa di Stella, marked by a large wooden panel that stood in the small beaten earth car park.

She stopped.

Wait there. He will come and guide you.

Wrap yourself up, it’s bound to be a bit cold.

She had put on a fawn cotton pullover, like an obedient little girl, as if it really was the ghost of her mother issuing this advice.

Ridiculous.

There was still time to run away, to get undressed, to press herself against Franck and show him the letter, tell him what had happened.

Ridiculous …

Six months ago he had circled the date of 21 August in his diary. Nothing could have stopped her husband from going sailing with his family, not even this letter. Not even if she confessed that she had a lover.

Far off in the forest, a toad croaked. A plaintive cry of love, or of encroaching death.

A lover, Clotilde thought again. Wouldn’t the best solution be to send a text to Natale? To explain, to ask him to drop everything and come and join her, to go with her, to protect her?

Ridiculous.

At that time of night, her brave knight was fast asleep in the arms of a policeman’s daughter who went to bed early because she got up at dawn to clock in at Calvi hospital while he took delivery of boxes of frozen fish.

Ridiculous.

Her whole life was nothing but a charade. In novels that dared to invent stories as surreal as her own, you would gradually realise, as you turned the pages, that the heroine was mad, that she suffered from schizophrenia, or multiple personality disorder, and that she had made up all those letters, that she had written them herself.

Clotilde heard no sound, she noticed no shadow. It was just that the darkness in front of her suddenly seemed darker, deeper, more intense, even though she couldn’t say why.

The lights of Calvi Bay and the lighthouse of La Revellata suddenly disappeared.

Then they reappeared all of a sudden, while the stars marked by yachts on the Mediterranean went out.

The black night was moving.

As she staggered forward, she could hear it now.