For a moment Clotilde let her eyes drift over towards the building site. An enormous panel masked off part of the works, emblazoned with the logos of Europe, the Region and the Département. It displayed a picture of an extravagant hotel complex, four or five storeys high. Even tucked away among the rocks, it was the only thing you would see for many kilometres around, from the sea or from the coastal road.

Clotilde was filled with a strange emotion that she couldn’t really define. For years she had tried to forget that wild rocky headland, that dangerous road, that deadly drop. But she couldn’t. Weirdly, coming back to the site of the tragedy, every turn, every fresh perspective on that divine backdrop took her further away from the accident, to a time before it. Towards all the years, all the summers before the tragedy, even if she had only vague memories, even if all that remained of her childhood holidays was the certainty that she loved that island, that countryside, those perfumes. That landscape, nevertheless, that was going to betray her. Corsica was like her, an orphan. Beautiful and lonely. It had been torn from its family twenty million years ago, from the mainland, from the Alps, from Estérel, to be left drifting in the Mediterranean.

Valou went on, craning her neck to point out the foundations of the future palace.

‘Cervone told me a bit about it when he saw that I was interested. I’ll be sixteen next year, so I might even be able to get a job there.’

Cervone …

Clotilde felt a painful electric shock. Her daughter was already calling that bastard by his first name. That building-developer-gambler-flirt who was twenty-five years older than Valou.

She counter-attacked without even thinking about it.

‘I don’t understand how they could allow something so horrendous to be built.’

Valentine gave in without a word, only allowing her eyes to wander from the billboard to the virgin landscape, as if she were already imagining the hotel sprung fresh from the ground.

The worst teenagers are the ones who refuse confrontation.

Clotilde went on the attack again. Slyly.

‘You could always ask Papé Cassanu, your great-grandfather, what he thinks about it. We’re going to his place for dinner tomorrow evening.’

‘Why?’

‘Just because.’

‘Is he one of those old Corsican separatists who used to plant bombs? Like that series, Mafiosa?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘And how old is my great-grandfather?’

‘He’ll be eighty-nine on the eleventh of November.’

‘Does he still live in that sheepfold at the ends of the earth? Don’t they have retirement homes in Corsica?’

Clotilde closed her eyes.

They were coming to Petra Coda, the precise spot where the Fuego had gone over the edge.

No one spoke. A piece of disco music came on the radio. Franck thought about turning down the volume, but didn’t.