She barely weighed forty kilos. She slipped through the broken glass without even feeling the shards as they lacerated her arms, her legs, her dress. She crawled a few metres away from the Fuego as a reflex, leaving red marks on the slippery stones.

She went no further than that. She just sat down and stared at the mixture of blood and petrol dripping from the bodies and the metal, the brains spilling from their skulls. It was there that the police, then the firemen, then the dozens of other emergency workers found her about twenty minutes later.

Clotilde had a broken wrist, three cracked ribs, and a scraped knee … Nothing.

A miracle.

‘There’s nothing wrong with you,’ an elderly doctor confirmed, leaning towards her in the blue halo of the spinning lights.

Nothing.

Exactly!

That was what she was left with now.

Papa, Maman and Nicolas’s bodies were wrapped up in large white bin-bags. Men walked around the red rocks, heads lowered, as if they were searching for other bits of them scattered about.

‘You have to live,’ a young policeman had said, settling a silver survival blanket around her shoulders. ‘You have to live for them. So you don’t forget them.’

She had looked at him as if he were an idiot, as if he were a priest talking about heaven. But he was right. Even the very worst memories are forgotten in the end, if you pile other ones on top of them, lots of other memories. Even the ones that have been etched on your heart, the ones that have left scars on your brain, even the most private ones. Particularly the most private ones.

Because no one else cares about those.

Twenty-seven years later …

I

Revellata

2

12 August 2016

‘This is it.’

Clotilde placed her little bunch of wild thyme beside the iron barrier. She had asked Franck to stop a few bends back along the road, so she could pick the mauve flowers from among the gorse that grew between the rocks of Petra Coda.

Enough for three people.

Franck did the same now, without taking his eyes off the road for a minute. The Passat was parked to one side, the hazard lights flashing.

Valentine was the last to stoop down, clearly reluctant, as if bending all one metre seventy of her was an unreasonable demand to make.

They all stood there, facing the twenty-metre drop. The roiling sea hurled itself at the red boulders, filling the fissures in the rocks with brown microalgae, like liver spots on old wrinkled skin.

Clotilde turned towards her daughter. At fifteen, Valentine was already a good fifteen centimetres taller than her. She was wearing a pair of jeans cut off above the knee and a House of Cards T-shirt. Not exactly ideal for visiting a mausoleum, leaving a bunch of flowers and respecting a minute’s silence.

Clotilde let it go. Her voice softened.