Twenty-seven years later, she strode impatiently down Rue Clemenceau. The swarming crowd on Calvi’s main shopping street calmed her, and she tried to lose herself in the window of the Lunatik shoe shop, lingered over the necklaces in Mariotti, the dresses in Benoa. Other images swam back to the surface, a vague impression of having experienced this same scene before. Then the veil was torn down and she could see the film clearly: the street in Calvi, her mother lingering in front of the shops just as she was doing today, her father giving her the black dress with the red roses and the ruby jewellery that she’d gone crazy about.

The pieces she’d been wearing on the day of the accident.

Only today did Clotilde understand the full extent of her father’s gesture, giving his wife the outfit in which she would die, her finery for the afterlife, the most alluring attire for their last loving gaze. Wasn’t that the greatest proof of love? Choosing together the outfit for one’s death, the way you would choose the clothes for your wedding.

Clotilde spent so long outside Benoa that Valou caught up with her. Clotilde didn’t often go shopping, even less so with her daughter. But through the miracle of the holidays, she now found herself with her daughter, gazing at the same charcoal dress, like accomplices excluding the man of the family from their game. Franck was waiting ten metres further on, leaning against the wall of the Saint Marie churchyard. This was so unlike them – Papa playing football with the boy, Maman going shopping with the girl. At least that was one advantage of having an only child, Clotilde thought; making that pernicious gender parity impossible.

The stream of tourists continued to struggle up the slope towards the citadel, in search of shade (in spite of the crowds, no one had yet thought of putting in some kind of lift). Once past the drawbridge, Clotilde hesitated for a moment. She thought about suggesting to Franck and Valentine that they could all go and have a drink at Tao, but immediately dismissed the idea as ridiculous: this pilgrimage along the footsteps of her youth had its limits, and Valou had probably never even heard a song by Jacques Higelin. Instead, Clotilde preferred to lose herself in the labyrinth of the streets in the citadel. She also lost Franck.

He joined them nineteen minutes and seven texts later, on the terrace of A Candella, a little square shaded by olive trees with a panoramic view over the harbour. When Clotilde saw Franck appearing along the ramparts, in front of the Tour de Sel, his hand behind his back clumsily concealing his Benoa bag, she forgot for a moment the sequence of mysteries dancing the devil’s salsa all around her. Franck had turned back to go to the clothes shop. Running back down two hundred metres. Just as her father had done.