Clotilde had gone to get a baguette, three croissants and a litre of milk that she was holding in a bag in one hand, with a litre of orange juice in the other. On the way back, she took a detour.

On purpose.

Valou was still asleep. Franck had gone for a run to the Sémaphore de Cavallo.

In the summer of ’89, Clotilde remembered, she had been sent off on the breakfast run every morning. She would drag her feet as she went in search of fresh bread at the reception desk; she would zigzag along the avenues of the Euproctes campsite, hoping to bump into someone, but none of the teenagers were awake at that time of day, so she had invented a complicated circuit through the maze of the campsite before coming back. Today, conversely, Clotilde had taken the shortest route possible to get to bungalow C29. The one where she had spent the first fifteen summers of her life.

She recognised only volumes. The size of the bungalow. The area of the site. The trees had grown, big olive trees whose trunks twisted up to form a canopy above the chalet which had extended its reach at ground level: a new electric awning, a terrace, a barbecue, an outdoor seating area. It had all been modernised through the good work of the new director of Euproctes, Cervone Spinello who, with sharp business sense, had taken over the running of his father Basile’s campsite. Every innovation – a tennis court, a water slide, a site marked out for the future swimming pool – confirmed Clotilde’s suspicion that barely anything remained of the natural campsite of her childhood, that shady terrain that provided nothing but a bed to sleep in, water for washing with and trees to hide among.

Studying the C29 site in greater detail, Clotilde reflected that she hadn’t seen it since the accident. In the days that followed the tragedy, Basile Spinello had brought her possessions to Calvi, to the hospital ward. A large bag containing her clothes, her mini-cassettes, her books. All of her personal items, except the one closest to her heart: her notebook. That notebook in which she had recorded her state of mind during that summer month. The notebook she had left behind on a bench at Arcanu Farm.

She had thought about it often during that time, on the plane that took her straight from Balagne Emergency Medical Centre to Paris, then in Conflans, the home of Jozsef and Sara, her mother’s parents, who had looked after her until she was eighteen. Over the years she had eventually forgotten the notebook. Clotilde reflected with amusement that it was probably still waiting for her somewhere, thirty years later, tidied away in a wardrobe drawer, slipped behind a piece of furniture, stuck on a shelf under a pile of yellowing books.