“Don’t look at me like that, I beg you,” Mathilde said, avoiding her gaze. “I can’t, Nora. For my kids, for Philippe...”
“Mathilde!”
“Damn it, Nora!” she snapped, feeling a thudding anxiety pervade her body. “You’re asking me to be nothing more nor less than an accomplice to murder. You’ve completely lost your mind. I can’t take the risk—”
“You can’t just drop me like this,” said Nora, her voice cracking. “Not now! I have to pick up my kids in twenty minutes and their father’s corpse is lying in the entryway. Mathilde, I beg you.” She stared at her beseechingly, trying to find the words to persuade her. “And you’re forgetting Milo,” she went on more assertively, as if she had found the decisive argument in her favor. “He saw you turn up at my house.”
Mathilde looked at her, appalled. Nora was right, there was no getting out of it now. She was in it up to her neck. “Unless you call the cops and tell them what happened.”
Nora was beside herself now. She was shaking uncontrollably. Her face was haggard, her eyes so tear-drenched she couldn’t see. She hiccupped with sobs as she pleaded with her friend, stammering out endless prayers and excuses. Distraught, Mathilde put her arms around her and held her tight.
As she clasped Nora to her, she knew she would never get her to call the police. But she also knew she didn’t have the strength to go any further. She was drained of all energy, and she felt as helpless as her friend. Ashamed, terrified, devastated. She loosened her embrace.
“I’m sorry, Nora. I can’t. I won’t say anything to anyone, but I can’t help you either. It’s too risky. You have to understand. I—” The words stuck in her throat, her mind was frozen with panic. If she spoke up now, she could still save her skin. She could tell the cops she’d tried to get her friend to call and tell them what had happened. That Nora had promised she would. After that, whatever Nora did, Mathilde would be protected: no one could accuse her of having shielded her friend. She clung to this logic: her responsibility to her family, the rightness of her decision. She fixed her gaze on the dashboard, where a photograph of her three children teased her with their beguiling grins, desperately focusing on avoiding Nora’s reproachful expression. Her pleading eyes. Her trembling lips.
“Mathilde...” Nora begged in a barely audible gasp, with a moan of utter despair.
Mathilde stared at her lap, unable to confront her friend’s desolation. “I’m sorry,” she replied dully.
Faced with such a pathetic surrender, Nora stopped weeping. She looked at Mathilde with sadness infused with disappointment and slowly nodded her head.
“I understand.”
That was all she said. Time seemed to stand still. A deathly silence filled the car. Two women, sitting side by side, each trying to break free from the other: Mathilde, bogged down by shame and confusion; Nora, caught between terror and bitterness. She was on her own now. There was no one else she could count on.
And so, drawing on an undreamed-of reserve of willpower, Nora wiped her eyes and breathed in deeply. Outside, a light rain was falling on the windscreen in unbroken, parallel rivulets. She stared at one of the drops that, unlike the others, seemed to be tracing its own path on the damp surface of the glass. A crazy thought, like this tiny glinting drop, began to glow as if from a great distance, from her dark future, like a cord appearing miraculously from who knew where, tumbling toward her. Into her mind burrowed a plan. An unbelievable image. A solution that could perhaps put everything right. A last exit. A dreadful, despicable, cruel, diabolical idea, so dastardly that she shuddered even to be considering it. Could she pull it off? And would her nerves prove solid enough to deal with her conscience?
The digital clock on the dashboard told her she had fifteen minutes left before Mélanie’s call.
Fifteen minutes to make a decision.
To make a choice.
To save her skin.
Chapter 39
In the house next door, the sun had set on the pitiless gleam of the shards of a long-moribund marriage, where two people who were once in love now saw in each other nothing more than a threat, an ordeal, danger.
They ate dinner in silence, for every single word Tiphaine or Sylvain uttered, brimming with shame, concealed in its syllables a potential wound. They were contaminated by a history that refused to remain in the past. That evening, the dead came, uninvited, to join their meal; the dead, whose absence filled their hearts and their minds.
A little boy with a broken body, whose empty eyes obstinately refused to meet those of his mother.
An elderly man, his features frozen by the violent ending of his life when he left behind the prison of his flesh.
A sallow young woman, eaten up from within by the poison of suspicion.
A man with a broken neck, garroted by the bonds of friendship.
All four took their places at the table, miming the act of eating, bringing invisible forks laden with nonexistent food to their lips. Tiphaine watched them, lost in the transitory meanderings of her penitence, grief, and guilt.
“Well, you’re a bundle of fun tonight,” muttered six-year-old Maxime.
“That’s enough, Milo, don’t push it,” said Sylvain, without looking up from his plate. Tiphaine looked up, shocked, to see the adolescent sitting opposite her, taken aback by the impossible metamorphosis. Maxime and Milo merged before her eyes, the smile of one, the expression of the other, the years that separated them, their voices echoing within her head in a demented chorus.
“Are you okay, Tiphaine?” asked Milo, looking at her with concern.
She shuddered. “Are you talking to me?”
