“I entered from the back,” she added. “The butcher. All those dead chickens waiting to be roasted.” She shuddered. “I don’t understand how people still eat meat.”
Constance looked a little gray, except for her eyes, which were bloodshot. The pain was written all over her face, and I wondered if I looked quite as upset. Or if Ishould. What did it say about me that I could think mostly straight? That I could make plans and strategize, even on no sleep?
“Are you okay?” I asked Constance.
“Nope.”
She wouldn’t look at me directly.
“What happened?” I asked.
She cocked her head to the side. “Some things happened.” But then she caught my meaning. “Not since the…party. Nothing you need to know about anyway.”
“Good. Let’s walk,” I said.
Again, I couldn’t believe how confident I sounded. We slowly made our way down the aisles, alongside elderly people dragging shopping caddies behind them. A woman with a neat mop of white curls smiled at us. I tried to imagine how we might look to her, like three friends who liked our produce fresh and with a side of girl talk.
“Bonjour,” I said with a reverent nod. “Belle journée, n’est-ce pas?”
She beamed as she greeted us in response.
“How do you do that?” Lou asked, when the woman was out of earshot.
“Speak French?”
“Compartmentalize.”
I cleared my throat and motioned for them to huddle closer as we kept walking.
“I thought about it. That’s all I’ve done. We have nothing to worry about. Nothing to hide, either. It’s going to be fine.”
“We watched him die,” Constance said, deadpan.
Lou stared around us. “Shhh! Are you crazy?”
“We did. We have to live with that,” Constance replied.
“But that’s done,” I said, stopping to admire some of the shiniest strawberries I’d ever seen.
I leaned forward and inhaled. The smell made my mouth water. I grabbed a carton and handed a ten euro bill to the grocer, trying to ignore the puzzled looks of both girls as I waited for him to count my change and give it to me.
“If we don’t buy anything, we’re going to look suspicious.”
“That’swhat’s going to make us look suspicious?” Lou retorted.
“Why are we here?” Constance asked.
I motioned for us to start walking again. I couldn’t keep still.
“Like I said, I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve come to the conclusion that we should…share what we know,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “Which is that we were drunk, and we needed a moment to gather ourselves. We only went down there to get some space. We saw a woman and a man arguing. It sounded intense. We couldn’t tell who they were. We stepped back because we felt like we shouldn’t be listening to their conversation. We didn’t see anything clearly. And then”—I’d considered the last part over and over—“Somethingwent overboard.”
Constance shook her head, like I was the world’s maddest woman. “Something?”
“It was dark,” I countered.
“You’re joking,” Constance said. “We saw two people arguing,somethingwent overboard, and then one person went back up to the party.”
She looked at Lou for support.
