Victor stopped speaking like a confident man.
He started talking like a defendant.
Elise has started therapy.
It wasn’t easy.
At first, she apologized for everything.
For having taken too long a shower.
To sleep in the middle of the afternoon.
To cry when Camille cried.
To ask for bread.
One morning, I found her in the kitchen counting coins on the table.
– What are you doing ?
She blushed.
— A habit.
I sat down opposite her.
— Here, you don’t pay for your food with money from traffic lights.
Then she cried.
Me too.
Because there are humiliations that remain stuck between our fingers.
The car was found in a parking lot in Saint-Ouen.
It had already been resold with forged documents.
We got it back several months later, scratched, with a damaged bumper and a lingering smell of cigarettes in the seats.
Elise didn’t want to see her.
« Sell it, » she said. « I don’t want to keep anything that has passed through Victor’s hands. »
— And the house?
It took her a while to reply.
— The house, yes. But not to go back to the way it was before.
We repainted everything.
We removed the furniture chosen by Geneviève.
We threw out the bed.
We moved the crib.
