“Something as easy as pie. Camille’s funeral will take place in a few days. You simply go to the ceremony, wait for her to be cremated afterward, then briefly borrow her urn so you can pour in the contents of mine. That’s it!”
“You forgot to mention giving it a good shake,” Thomas deadpanned.
“That goes without saying.”
“So, to sum up, you want me to attend the funeral of a woman I didn’t know but who was your mistress, and then steal what’s left of her out from under the nose of her family.”
“You’ve got it!”
“I’d rather you’d asked me to get you the moon. It certainly would be easier. Where is this funeral, by the way?”
“In San Francisco.”
“Naturally.” Thomas sighed.
“Why did you say ‘naturally’ in that weird tone of voice?”
“Now my tone is weird?”
“Very. Quite strange.”
“I guess it would have been too easy for the funeral to take place in Pantin or at Père-Lachaise Cemetery.”
“Not necessarily. But I had nothing to do with it. I’m not the one who sent her to live so far away. Despite our exceptional discretion, her husband figured out what we were up to and was careful to keep us away from each other. He arranged to get a job transfer to California, choosing—rather selfishly, if you ask me—to uproot his family.”
“I actually think it’s pretty brave of him, leaving everything behind for love. Traveling to the other side of the world to protect his marriage.”
“Not for love, out of jealousy!”
“Why did his wife go with him if she loved you so much?”
“Because of her daughter. The same reason I stayed in Paris for you.”
“Oh, right. For a moment, I forgot that I ruined your life.”
“I never said that, and I didn’t think it, either. In any case, keeping us apart didn’t change the way she felt.”
“How do you know that?”
“After she left, I decided I needed to live with the choice I’d made. I let her go because I couldn’t leave you and your mother. I refused to torment Camille, so I kept quiet for months. I felt the pain of that silence every single day, and even more so when we were on summer vacation. If Camille had fallen back in love with her husband, she wouldn’t have started writing to me, and we wouldn’t have continued to correspond for the next twenty years. But she did, and we did.”
“You told some other woman all about our lives?”
“I told her about mine. The letters were mostly about me, but not entirely, it’s true.”
“What about her husband? What did he do out there in California? No, you know what, don’t even answer that. I don’t know why I’m asking.”
“He went there as an aeronautics engineer, but he played the tech boom in Silicon Valley just right and ended up a multimillionaire. I find it all a bit gauche, but to each his own, right?”
“Did you know him?”
“Of course I did. The situation was all terribly banal. We couples ran into each other all the time on vacation, so we ended up becoming friendly. We had dinner together on occasion, and we even shared a babysitter, who watched you and their daughter at the same time. Right up until Camille and I understood that we had fallen for each other.”
“Those must have been fun evenings. Two lovers and two emotionally abandoned spouses—one of them Mom—all at the same table.”
“Wait until you’ve lived a little more before you judge me. Would you believe me if I told you that my relationship with Camille was always perfectly chaste?”
“Why wouldn’t I believe you? You’ve told me far more unbelievable things than that.”
