Dom and I stayed on in Cassis. From time to time, we thought about progressing along the coast in the direction of Nice, but in the end, we felt comfortable in Mme. Jozan’s white hotel. Weeks went by and still we stayed away from Les Genévriers.
Through the heat and sleepless nights, we rode out the summer. Dom was like a victim of shell shock, as if, with his confession to me and the dismantling of his emotional defenses, he was only now allowing himself to react to the police investigation and the grisly discoveries at the house. It would take months for him to come to terms with what had happened.
I stood back and allowed him to be, listening when he wanted me to listen, reassuring when he seemed to be asking for reassurance, turning to him at night when he felt for my body, wondering if he would discover the secret I still kept. When would be the right time to tell him? It seemed too demanding of the future, to risk telling him before he had come to terms with the past. Perhaps telling him would give me fewer options than not telling. I was thinking of my own independence.
As the summer faded, we found an approximation of peace. The walking helped, sometimes with Dom, more often not. Between the tumbling slopes and steep, pine-bristled ravines, the sea was a constant companion. Its dazzle lifted the letters off the pages of my walking guide until I could see precisely how each black mark was stamped on the soft paper.
At night, I dreamed of the crumbling hamlet on the hill. I sensed it always was a place of secrets. It was, in my old understanding, like a sentence hung in midair: abrupt, unresolved. Surely there should have been another page, but that was all I had, the ghosts and intimations of a half-told story.
Perhaps the house in the dreams (that was and was not itself) had come to stand for our relationship. I was afraid it might.
One day, I bought a local newspaper at a kiosk and took it down to the harbor to read while I drank coffee. Three pages in, my heart lurched as I read the words “missing students” and the name “Marine Gavet,” “also known as Magie.” A grainy black-and-white photograph in the paper showed her laughing, caught on a security camera at a bank where she had recently opened an account. Her parents had arrived from Goult. Anyone who saw her should call the Cassis police.
Magie. What Francis Tully called his young model. I debated whether to call the police myself, with my feeble contribution, my hunch that she arrived in Cassis with Tully and posed for him. Perhaps she stayed on; perhaps she had caught a glimpse of another life and decided to grab it. Perhaps speculation was pointless.
I was still undecided when the call came from Severan that evening. The rocks burned below our balcony and the sea shuddered, and we were summoned to return.