“Play well, my boy. Be strong.”
“You can count on me,” he said automatically.
“Can we go now?” Sylvain said impatiently.
At last she let Milo go. He marched out the front door ahead of Sylvain. As Sylvain was about to follow she said, “Goodbye, Sylvain.”
He turned and looked at her for a moment, frowning as if asking her a question. “I’ll see you later, Tiphaine.”
She didn’t reply, and the door swung closed.
Chapter 52
“What exactly did she say to you?”
Nora sat gently stroking Nassim’s hair and trying to get him to tell her precisely what had happened with Tiphaine. She needed to figure out the threat. The child had calmed down now and was trying to tell his mother about the horrible experience he’d been through.
“She wanted to play. She said she was my mom and I was her little boy.”
Nora looked at her son with concern.
“How did she want to play?”
“She told me to call her Maman.”
Nora closed her eyes and sighed. Tiphaine was crazy. Her little boy had been spending time on his own with a crazy person. She decided to file a complaint against her neighbor, in no doubt that Nassim’s account of what had happened would be enough to prove what a danger Tiphaine posed to her and her children.
“Then what did she do?”
“She made me a snack.”
“And then?”
“She wanted to give me a hug.”
“A hug? What kind of a hug?”
“A hug, in her arms.”
“And did you?”
“No. I didn’t want to.”
Nora pondered this. The fact that Tiphaine had played with Nassim, made him a snack, and asked for a hug wasn’t proof that she posed any kind of danger.
“Was she mean to you?”
“Not really.”
“So why were you scared of her?”
“Because I don’t like her.”
She sighed. She had no evidence at all against Tiphaine. If she filed a complaint that claimed the woman had mistreated her son and had said the things he’d just told her, the cops would laugh her out of town. And now she didn’t have the incriminating documents either. Her only defense was held in the enemy camp—Tiphaine had the documents, which meant she must have realized that Gérard had been to see Nora before he disappeared. Basically, the file was as much of a double-edged sword for Tiphaine as for her. No one would think it had been in Nora’s house until Gérard’s visit to the Geniots: why would her estranged husband’s work have ended up in her living room?
But if Nora couldn’t provide proof of the danger posed by her neighbors without betraying the fact that Gérard Depardieu had been in her house after he visited the Geniots, nor could Tiphaine accuse Nora of having seen the lawyer after she had without presenting documents that incriminated her.
The documents were the pin in a hand grenade ready to explode. It was much better to be the one to decide when the time was right to set it off. The only problem was that right now it was Tiphaine keeping the pin in place.
