“Um, yes,” he replied, surprised by the question.
“Why are you calling me Tiphaine?”
Milo cast a startled glance at Sylvain, who was staring miserably at his wife.
“What do you want me to call you?” Milo asked.
“Maman. I want you to call me Maman.”
“That’s enough, Tiphaine,” said Sylvain.
She gave him a look of profound sadness.
“What do you mean, that’s enough? Every child calls their mother Maman.”
“Yeah, they do,” Milo said, on the defensive. “Except you’re not my mother.”
Tiphaine trembled at this strike, devastated by the cruelty he was raining down on her, these words, like daggers, spat out in a loathing born of unrelenting bitterness. Why did he hate her so much? She had done nothing wrong.
All she had done was forget to close a window.
As soon as the meal was over, Milo went up to his room, with no intention of coming back down again. The atmosphere in the house was so suffocating, it was making his life a constant misery. They’d obviously had another fight, but this time it looked serious. And there was the visit from that guy who was probably the last person to have seen his father alive. Inès’s father. Life could be so strange sometimes. Milo drew out the attorney’s business card from the back pocket of his jeans and thoughtfully spun it between his fingers. What an idiot he was to have gone to see Inès. What would she have been able to tell him? She wouldn’t know anything. And he had promised himself not to have anything to do with her anymore, to protect her from his feelings, which put her in danger. A bit like he’d done with those two downstairs, who were clearly going to end up destroying themselves, consumed by their destructive relationship, the poison of passing time, the memory of Maxime.
The whole thing was toxic.
Milo gave a bitter laugh. He must never give in to the siren song of love. The happiness of love is a lure, a lie we tell our children so as not to scare them. Love breeds nothing but torment, sadness, and despair. Love causes devastating harm.
Downstairs, Sylvain cleared the table, put the dirty dishes and flatware in the dishwasher, and scrubbed the saucepans. Tiphaine sat at the table staring into space, while various devious solutions unspooled in her mind. She had to grab the sword of Damocles that hung over her head and decapitate the problem. Definitively. With a sharp blow, without any missteps. Shut up that despicable lawyer once and for all, in the most horrible way possible. And so find peace.
But first she would have a little fun. Something she hadn’t experienced in a long time.
“I’m going up to bed,” Sylvain said in a toneless voice. It was very early, but she didn’t reply. Sylvain looked at her sadly for a few seconds, then left the room.
Tiphaine sat, caught up in her fantasies, soothing her misery by envisaging various ways of hurting the attorney. Glimpsing the end of this nightmare. He shouldn’t have attacked her, threatened to tell Milo everything, stuck his obnoxious, lawyerly nose into her business. He shouldn’t have done it.
She was going to make him suffer. He had no idea what she was capable of. What she was planning would destroy them both, him and his bitch of a wife.
In the middle of the night Sylvain woke with a start. He was soaked in sweat, his heart was beating abnormally fast, and he was struggling to breathe. He felt for the lamp switch and turned it on. The other side of the bed was empty. Tiphaine hadn’t come up. He sighed, kicked off the covers, and went downstairs. She was lying on the sofa underneath a blanket. The message was clear: from now on they would be sleeping apart.
Chapter 40
Saturday morning. Nora opened her eyes after a restless night. Her sleep had been peopled by malevolent specters. She was in pain, emotional and physical. Her neck hurt, her shoulders and back were stiff, the echo of a night filled with terrible dreams. She groaned, desperate to fall into the no-man’s-land of sleep, to escape the throes of fear. She tried turning onto her side, curling up as if to protect herself from the abuses her memory was inflicting on her. Every movement triggered a dull pain and the memory of the ghastly events of the previous night.
The worst night of a life that now lay in ruins.
It took her several long minutes to gather the strength to get out of bed. From downstairs she could hear the muffled voices of her children, who were already up. She gave a sigh that seemed to vibrate with all the world’s misery.
At last she managed to haul herself out of bed. Her arms ached; it felt as if she would dislocate her shoulders if she moved. Her muscles hurt from the effort of moving Gérard’s body. Christ! Had she really done it?
She tiptoed to the bathroom and steadied herself on the edge of the basin. She felt like throwing up. She barely recognized the face in the mirror, cruel witness to the awful hours she’d been through.
Yes, she had done it.
She had seen it through to the bitter end.
She had climbed out of Mathilde’s car like an automaton and walked back to the house without a backward glance, her expression vacant, finding from deep within her a determination she didn’t recognize. She stopped outside the front door, perhaps giving herself one last chance to change her mind before she committed the irrevocable. Don’t dothat.
Braving her revulsion, she pushed open the door and went inside. Gérard lay at the foot of the stairs, blood pooling on the tiles around his body. The sight of the dark, sticky substance almost broke her resolve:who would have thought he would have had so much blood in him. She had to act quickly; cleaning up hadn’t been part of the plan. Pulling herself together, she glanced at her watch and went down to the basement. She lost precious seconds looking for the tarpaulin she knew was in there somewhere, that must once have belonged to Madame Coustenoble, the previous owner. At last she found it, blue and crumpled, and dragged it up the stairs to wrap Gérard’s body in. It wasn’t easy to lay it out; the entryway wasn’t very wide and the body was already taking up a fair amount of space. She had to keep starting again, forcing herself to control her shaking and her clumsiness, but she managed it eventually. Then she had to drag the corpse over to the tarp to roll it up inside. Touching the dead body repulsed her. Summoning all her courage, she seized Gérard by his jacket lapels and bumped him over to the plastic-coated canvas. Disgust. Don’t think about it. Don’t breathe. Focus on what has to be done and do it. Get to the end of this nightmare.
