The Fortress

Andy left in early May, and we were alone in our ruined paradise.

Although it was beautiful outside, and the courtyard was alive with flowers and birdsong, a toxic energy seeped through the house, filling the rooms with a poisonous tension. We didn’t know how to behave, now that we were enemies. And so we avoided each other. When I walked into a room, he turned on his heel and walked out. When he walked up the stairs, I closed myself in the bedroom to wait until he’d passed by. Sometimes this cat-and-mouse game became elaborate: I would sneak out a back door, or hide in a closet to avoid him. La Commanderie was big, but not big enough for the two of us.

If we ended up in the same room at the same time, we fought. When Andy was there with us, Nikolai had avoided fighting with me. He hated the idea of people witnessing our feud. But now we argued all the time. We fought about something his lawyer had said, or about something I’d said to Nico, or about something he or I had done years before that needed to be addressed right then and there.

My emotions shifted by the minute. One day I would feel bitter: All those worthless, wasted years. All that effort to be happy together. What was the point of this marriage? Another day I would feel guilt: Look what I’ve done. I’ve hurt everyone. I’ve ruined everything. Then I was the victim: This is all his doing. He’s ruined my life, and he’s ruined the kids’ lives, too. Then I was angry, raging about the man who threatened to take the things I most cherished—children, friends, home. And in moments of clarity, I became remorseful, mourning the loss of my family, remembering the times Nikolai and I had been partners, when we’d been on the same side. In those moments I would feel complete and unmitigated sadness. All our shared memories, our love for Alex and Nico, the time spent with his family and with my family, our professional ups and downs—all of these experiences were ours. We had lived them together. And although I wanted the whole horrible mess of our marriage to be over and done with, part of me wanted the whole horrible mess to reverse itself, to rewind. I wanted go back to the beginning and live it all again. I wanted to be free of him, but I wanted to keep him, too.

This contradiction was at the heart of everything I did and everything I thought in those weeks. I couldn’t accept the idea of losing my family, and so I continued onward as if I weren’t. I didn’t call the lawyer that Hadrien had recommended, and I didn’t make plans to move out of La Commanderie. We were splitting up, but nothing, nothing, was going to change.

I didn’t realize how cracked this line of thinking seemed until my friend Gretta, a German woman who lived in a house off the rue Droite, stopped by one afternoon. She was married to a talented chef named Jules, who had made many dinners for Nikolai and me at their home. I invited Gretta to sit down at the outdoor table, in the shadow of the micocoulier tree. She lifted her infant son from a carrier on her chest and set him on the flagstones, letting him crawl after the cats, who regarded him with the same wariness they reserved for Fly. Gretta had a daughter Nico’s age, and the girls played together after school and on the weekends. We’d become close in the past year, and I was sure that Nikolai had stopped by their place to tell Gretta and Jules about our problems.

When I returned with two cups of coffee, I noticed Gretta looking over the table, her brow furrowed. The table was littered with ashtrays and empty wine bottles, the remnants of Nikolai’s evenings of drinking and chess playing. Lord had become a regular visitor, and the two of them were going through the wine cellar, drinking off the best bottles, cleaning out whatever Nikolai had not taken with him on his Easter trip.

I began to clean off the table. “Nikolai must have had friends over,” I said.

Gretta stopped me. “Listen,” she said. “I have something to tell you, and you will probably not be very happy to hear it, but it is important that someone tell you what’s happening.”

“What’s happening?” I said, as if I there were nothing at all out of the ordinary going on in my life, as if it were just another sunny afternoon in the Midi with two women having coffee in the shade. Luxe, Calme et Volupté.

“There are things that Nikolai is saying about you,” she said, giving me a serious look. “In the village.”

The tone of her voice chilled me. “Nikolai has been at your place?”

“He came three times in the last week,” she said. “He stays up drinking with Jules.” She looked uncomfortable but continued. “I’m not going to repeat the details, honey, but he’s saying things about you that strike me as . . . well, they just don’t seem like you. Honestly, I don’t recognize the woman he’s talking about.” She bent over and wiped her son’s nose. “I know what it’s like to have people gossip about me—we live in a small town, after all, and people always talk—but those people are not my husband.”

“What is he saying?” I asked.

She bit her lip. “It is like you’re the devil or something—the most evil woman in the world. He comes to our place and starts complaining about you and goes on about how you are mentally sick, an alcoholic, suicidal. He talks about how you’ve ruined his life. He says things about you that are totally unbelievable.”

“Like what?” I said, feeling my stomach clench. I had some clue about what he was saying, but I wanted to hear her say it.

“About your character, darling. About your abilities as a mother. He says you have a drug problem that keeps you from being a good wife. He says you’re frigid, but then he turns around and says that you are a slut. He isn’t making much sense.”

“I must be both,” I said, sarcastic. “A frigid slut.”

“I don’t believe what he says anyway. I know you, and I’m not blind: I can see the truth for myself.” She looked at me a moment, as if trying to decide something. “But you know, if he keeps doing this routine around the village, people are going to start listening to him.”

“He’s angry,” I said. “He’s trying to hurt me. Isn’t it obvious?”

She looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “He’s making his stories pretty believable.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I asked anyway. “How?”

“Last night he came to our house and told us that you had a history of having affairs. When I told him I didn’t believe him, he took out a piece of paper. It was an e-mail you wrote to a man named Jack. I read it. It looks pretty bad for you, darling.”

“That is an old e-mail,” I said, realizing suddenly that Nikolai had been planning this. He’d saved the e-mail so that he could use it against me one day, and I had to admit he’d used it to great effect. Although the incident with Jack had been one night of partying, Nikolai had turned it into a full-fledged duplicitous affair. “That happened years ago,” I said lamely. “And it wasn’t actually an affair. It was just a stupid fling.”

“And this new guy?” she asked, referring to Hadrien.

“That’s a different story,” I said. “I met him with Nikolai when we were in Paris in March.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. People have new relationships. It’s natural. But he’s saying that you’ve been sneaking around on him for your entire marriage.”

“He doesn’t just want to divorce me. He wants to humiliate me. He wants to make sure that I can’t go anywhere in this village again.”

I put my head on the table and closed my eyes. It was one thing for the village to know we were splitting up, but it was another for people to believe I was a bipolar, alcoholic, suicidal nympho. I was so mortified that I wanted to crawl into bed and stay there for a week. I had always been sensitive about what other people thought of me. Consciously or unconsciously, I’d stayed within irreproachable feminine boundaries: the good wife, the good mother, pretty but not tasteless, sexy but not flamboyant, in control but not controlling. I shouldn’t have cared if people judged me, but I did care, especially when the information they had was so one-sided. Surely people in the village understood that a love story is a duet. Sometimes in sync, sometimes out of rhythm, but there are always two voices. There was Nikolai’s story, and of course there was mine.

“I didn’t come here to upset you,” Gretta said, rubbing my hand. “I’m here, darling, because I want to tell you that you need to wake up. I know you want to pretend this isn’t happening. It’s only natural, but you need to fight back.”

“How?” I said.

“Do you have a lawyer?” she asked.

I shook my head. Although Hadrien had been urging me to call the lawyer he’d found, I hadn’t been able to actually dial the number. I was stuck, frozen, unable to move forward to do anything that would make the situation real.

“So you must call a lawyer today,” she said. “As soon as I leave. You shouldn’t have to go through this by yourself. Get help. You aren’t the only one who has had a bad breakup.”

Gretta was right. I needed to defend myself. I needed to stop living in Neverland and get help.

“This is a small place,” she said. “Everyone knows everything. Even if you don’t say a word, they know.”

“Believe me, I see that.”

“And people are always harder, more judgmental, with women. A man can do almost anything and get away with it. But a woman? Never. If you don’t defend yourself, they’ll burn you at the stake.”

I WASN’T SPENDING time out in the village, but I wasn’t completely alone either. After Andy left, I spoke to my mom on the phone many times each week. I also called Diana in London and my friend Laura, who lived in New York City. These women had been through divorces—Diana was still going through her divorce, and Laura had been divorced ten years before. Together they gave advice and support that kept me from sinking even deeper into isolation. Laura was a lawyer, a mother of two, and she understood exactly what it felt like to be in my shoes. Laura’s ex-husband had suffered mental-health issues, and she stressed that these problems had only become worse during their divorce. “There is no rational way to discuss things with a man like that,” she’d said. “It’s black or white. You’re his perfect goddess or you’re his worst enemy. A narcissistic personality makes everything into a personal attack. When he feels you’ve turned on him, he’ll go for blood. You could offer him every last dime you have, you could give him full custody of your kids, and he’ll want more, because it isn’t about finding a solution—it’s about his ego.”

Diana phoned me from London to tell me she had consulted her psychic, Yolanda, about my situation. Diana had consulted Yolanda in the past about her own divorce, and had told me that the woman had an uncanny ability to see these kinds of situations clearly. Diana gave Yolanda the basic information about me and Nikolai—birthdays, the fact that we had a child, and that we were having relationship troubles. I had never consulted a psychic before, but at that point I was interested in hearing anything that might help me to understand what to do next. Yolanda sent the following assessment of the situation:

The meeting in Time and Space between Danielle and Nikolai happened only so that they could create the child.

At this point they do not have a common path together. If they manage to achieve a peaceful existence and do not get divorced and everyone has their own private life, that would be fine. If not, they will be better off apart. (That is if they are formally married.) If they are not married, they are practically not together. If at this point they manage to get over their EGOs, they will give the child a chance to go very far. The child is a gift from God—a soul which has come into this world for art, for Love. The child is overly sensitive, and there is a danger that if at the moment they do not manage to get over themselves, they might put her into such a state of stress that she will shut down. The child has very abstract thinking, and with parents, between whom there is peace, love and harmony, she could show the world what she is capable of. Of course, I write all this with an “if.”

At this point they really do not have a common path together, and splitting up would lead to a calm environment. If the child has not been christened, she should get christened. The bond between the child and the father is very strong. Why hasn’t the child taken the family name of the father? I am just curious.

Neither you nor I could give advice to Danielle. She chooses what to do.

As a whole, if they can survive 2012 and 2013 without divorcing and to live together in peace, from 2014 they can get close again. The choice is theirs.

Diana and Laura were very different women, but they both urged me to get the financial situation under control. Nikolai and I had joint bank accounts, we owned the house together, and all our assets were mixed. Beginning with his trip to Bulgaria by way of Venice, he was burning through a lot of cash.

My mom was worried about money, too, but she was more concerned about the living arrangement. “Has he moved out yet?” she would ask when she called from the States. She had been getting updates about the situation from Andy when he was still in Aubais, and she knew how emotionally tense the breakup had become. “It’s clear to me,” she said during one of our calls, “that one of you will need to leave that house. Like now.”

“His lawyer told him that if he leaves, I can take legal possession of the house,” I said. “So he says he won’t go.”

A few years back, a childhood friend had been killed by her husband during an argument. He’d hit her over the head with a lamp. She died of head trauma, and the husband went to jail. This was the unspoken benchmark of how bad things could get.

“Then you need to get out of there,” she said. “It’s not safe.”

“But the kids are here. I can’t abandon them during this. And if I leave, it’s the same thing: He has possession of the house.”

“So you’re both squatting?”

“We’re both squatting.”

“Well, better safe than sorry,” she said, worry filling her voice. “People go out of their minds during a divorce. You need to make a clear separation. If you’re alone together in that house, anything could happen.”

NOT LONG AFTER Andy left, our separate domains of La Commanderie solidified into two distinct territories. Nikolai’s territory comprised the entire first floor: his office, my office, the window-lined salon with the piano, the downstairs kitchen, and the dining room. Mine was the second floor, with the kids’ rooms, the attic playroom, the master bedroom, and the makeshift upstairs kitchen. Although the kids roamed between the floors and had access to the courtyard whenever they wished, I didn’t go to the first floor if I could help it. I used a back stairway that led directly to the garden to get outside, and I only went to the courtyard when I was certain that Nikolai was gone.

One afternoon I decided to clear out all of Nikolai’s belongings from the second floor. I set about removing his clothes from our closet and packing them in a duffel bag. As I folded his cotton dress shirts into a crisp pile, I noted that I’d chosen almost all these shirts. I remembered buying the purple-and-black-striped one in Paris the year before. I loved shopping in Paris, and I’d had fun buying it. I had worried over the size and the fabric, wondering if the color would be right for him. I realized, as I threw the shirts in the duffel bag, that he hadn’t actually worn many of them. Lots of them still had the price tags attached. I had liked the shirt with the purple and black stripes, but maybe it hadn’t been his style.

I grabbed a stack of jeans and threw them into the bag. The Vilebrequin swim trunks I’d bought on clearance, all his socks—matched or mismatched—I dumped in. T-shirts. Underwear (boxers and briefs), sweatshirts—I removed every last piece of clothing that was in our closet until his half was empty. I pushed my clothes over to his side, spreading them out, letting them luxuriate in all the space. It was so strange, so unnatural, having such an empty closet.

The duffel bag was heavy, as if I’d zipped a cadaver inside. I dragged it down the hallway to the stairs. I passed the Paris-Lyon door, descending the stone steps, letting the bag thud as I went. The steps were worn to a gloss from hundreds of years of feet passing up and down, and although I had walked them many times, I was always careful not to slip, especially after I’d fallen when Nico was in Bulgaria. I knew from experience that it was a long, hard drop to the bottom.

I’d planned to leave the bag outside Nikolai’s office door and go back upstairs, quick and quiet, before he had the chance to come out. But as I dropped it, something strange caught my eye. There, carved into the wood of his office door, was a series of symbols:

I studied them, trying to recognize the strange shapes. They were not letters or even pictures, but a strange script I couldn’t read. I looked at it sideways, back to front. Suddenly I understood: These were Tibetan words. I had seen such symbols in the Buddhist texts Nikolai had on his altar and in the books in his office. I squinted at the symbols, wishing I could understand their meaning. Maybe they were some kind of prayer, or wish, or mantra. I couldn’t know for sure, as I didn’t understand Tibetan and had no access to a Tibetan dictionary.

Suddenly the door swung open and Nikolai stood before me. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for days—his black hair stuck up in all directions, and his face was pale and puffy. He had dark circles under his eyes. He reeked of smoke and sweat. I glanced over his shoulder. There were bottles of wine everywhere, ashtrays overflowing with pipe tobacco, books and papers spread on the floor. There were pillows and blankets on his couch and a pile of dirty clothes thrown in a corner.

“What do you want?” he said, glancing down at the duffel bag.

I pushed it to him—These belong to you—and pointed to the carved symbols on the door. “What’s that?”

He stared at me, confused.

“The door,” I said. “What in the hell is that?”

“What does it look like?”

“Vandalism.”

“It’s not vandalism,” he said, his nostrils flaring. “It’s protection.”

“Protection from what?”

“From you.”

“Do you think I’m going to break down your door?” I asked.

“Protection from your psychic attacks.”

I considered this phrase a moment. Psychic attacks. Nikolai was telling me that he’d carved a Buddhist mantra into the door of his office to protect himself from my psychic attacks.

“I don’t even know what’s involved in a psychic attack,” I said.

“You should. You do it all the time,” he said. “Even when you don’t realize it. Your mind creates the attack, and I feel it in the air.”

“Like pheromones?” I asked.

He started to close the door. I put my foot in the way. I wasn’t done yet.

“This is an antique door,” I said. “You can’t just ruin it like this.”

“Does it look like I care about the fucking door?” he replied, bending to pick up the duffel bag. It was true. He didn’t look like he cared about the door. He didn’t look like he cared if he carved up everything we owned, or if he emptied our bank account, or fucked up our kids, or destroyed all our friendships. He didn’t care if he dragged himself in the mud, so long as I was dirtier at the end of the struggle.

NIKOLAI WAS GONE—THE Citroën was not parked in the courtyard, and his office door was locked shut—when I rounded up the kids. “Who wants to go to Sommières for ice cream?” I yelled down the hall. They emerged from their bedrooms. Alex put on his shoes and seemed ready to go, but Nico seemed uncertain. Since they had returned from Bulgaria, Nikolai had a habit of keeping Nico under his watch at all times. I couldn’t know for sure, but I suspected that he asked her to report to him all her actions when she was with me, as if I might do exactly what he had done: Steal her away when he wasn’t looking. The thought had crossed my mind. I could load both kids and Fly into the car, drive away from Aubais, and never look back.

But that wasn’t the plan. Today we were only going for ice cream. Alex tucked a book under his arm, and Nico slipped on some sandals, and together they followed me out to the car. But when I went to open the gate, it wouldn’t budge. The gate was heavy, and I’d always had some trouble with it, but now it wouldn’t move no matter how hard I pulled. I tried again, putting my weight into it, but it didn’t slide an inch. I was about to ask Alex to help when I saw something stuck under the bottom of the gate: There was a board wedged into the groove between the gate and the ground. Someone—it wasn’t too hard to guess who—had worked it under, jamming the door closed. I squatted down and began working the wood out, tugging and prying at it, mumbling, “Does that motherfucker really think he can block me in the house with a piece of wood? I’m not that easy to lock up.” A splinter slid under my fingernail, and I scraped my knuckles on the gravel, but I managed to tug the board free and toss it aside. Freedom, I thought as I unlatched the gate, lugging the heavy doors open.

But as the door swung back, I saw a streak of silver glinting in the afternoon sun: It was the Citroën, parked in front of the gate, blocking my car from leaving. I couldn’t take the kids to Sommières for ice cream if I couldn’t drive through the gate. Absolute pin.

I looked at the car for a long moment. My mother’s Toyota Celica had been the exact same shade of silver. I remembered the time, just after my parents split up, when my father had yanked out the spark plugs of my mother’s Toyota. It had been the dead of winter, the streets covered with snow, the worst conditions in which to be carless in Wisconsin. I paid for that car! my father had yelled, shaking the spark plugs in his fist. I’ll be damned if you’ll drive it! My mother said nothing, but she turned and walked off into the snowstorm, disappearing in a white haze.

“Why did Dad park the car there?” Alex asked, scrunching up his nose as if trying to solve a bizarre riddle.

“I’m not sure,” I said, leaving the gate open and walking into the downstairs kitchen, enemy territory, where I pulled out a box of Petit Écolier cookies from a drawer. I’d wanted to talk to them over ice cream, but milk and cookies would have to do. I put the cookies on a plate and poured out two glasses of milk.

“Sit down a minute, guys,” I said.

Nico took a cookie and said, “Are we going to have another one of your talks?”

“Are there so many?”

“Like so many,” she grumbled, biting into the cookie. They were her favorite, and we always had a box or two in the cupboard.

“All the time,” Alex agreed. “You’re always asking how we’re feeling.”

I hadn’t realized I’d been doing that, but now that they mentioned it, I could see I’d been checking in with them about their feelings a lot more than usual, like every day.

“It’s a good question to ask,” I countered. “It’s important to be able to talk about how you feel.”

“I feel like going back upstairs to play Sims,” Alex said.

“Actually,” I said, “I just want all three of us to be able to talk to one another.”

Nico and Alex exchanged an Oh, my God, Mom look.

“I know this isn’t easy. You’re brother and sister,” I said. “You two need to stick together.”

“Actually,” Nico said, “Alex is not my real brother.”

I stared at her, stupefied. We’d never made this distinction in the past, and Nico had never said anything even remotely like that before.

Alex looked hurt. “I am too your real brother,” he said.

“My dad is not your dad, and so you’re not my real brother,” Nico said. “You are my half brother.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if this was Nikolai’s doing, his new strategy. Divide and conquer. If he could sever the connection between Nico and her brother, he could take her more easily. It would be easier for her to leave her brother behind. It seemed to me that he was ripping apart the seams of our family, stitch by stitch, until all connections were gone.

“Do you know, Nico,” I said, “when you were a newborn baby, Alex was one of the first people to hold you after we came home from the hospital. I have a picture of him with you in his arms. And do you remember who helped you learn to ride your bike? It was Alex. And who shared a room with you in Providence, before we came to France? Alex again. He’s always been with you, Nico. That makes him your real brother.”

“What if I told you that you’re not my sister, Nico?” Alex said, and the pain in his voice shot through me. She had really hurt him. “How would you feel then?”

Nico gave Alex and me a confused look.

“The people who love you and who are here for you are your family,” I said. “That’s what’s important.”

Also important was that I didn’t re-create my past in the present. I found myself comparing my divorce with my parents’ divorce more and more, trying to tease out lessons and wisdom from what I’d witnessed as a child. I didn’t want to repeat their mistakes. When my parents separated, it felt like being pulled apart, stretched between my mother and my father until my ligaments snapped and my muscles ripped and my limbs tore. After the divorce I had collected my damaged self and stitched her back together, but I was always weak at the scars. I didn’t want that to happen to Alex and Nico. I would do anything to protect them. Even if it meant giving them up.

WHILE THEIR FATHER was living downstairs, and our life was veering off into the strangest of territories, I tried to make things seem as normal as possible for Alex and Nico. I took refuge in our routines, the ones I had worked so hard to establish. Every day they sat at the upstairs kitchen table and finished their homework, ate le goûter, and read Le Petit Quotidien. Every night I made sure they had baths and kisses at bedtime. We played board games and read stories as Fly, our stubby guardian, sat by the Paris-Lyon door, his ears prickling up every time he heard something in the stairwell.

Alex and Nico needed a normal life, and a normal life meant that there could be no crying in front of them, no speaking on the phone about the divorce within their hearing, no bad-mouthing Nikolai in front of them. Normal meant keeping up appearances—keeping myself clean, well dressed, and functioning on a basic level—while in reality I felt incapable of getting out of bed every morning. Normal meant no phone calls with Hadrien when the kids were around, no mention of Hadrien, not even the slightest hint that there was someone in the world named Hadrien. Normal meant being strong for them when I barely had the strength to keep myself going.

The Saturday afternoon in the fourth week of the standoff, I’d shut myself into the bedroom and was talking to Hadrien. Nico and Alex were out in the courtyard playing Ping-Pong, and so I thought it was safe to give Hadrien a call. We spoke every day, often for hours at a time. He called late at night, after the kids had gone to bed, and I would be hurled into another dimension, one of understanding and friendship, one filled with jokes and tenderness. We talked about everything and began to know each other more deeply. I discovered in these long conversations that he was caring and emotionally articulate. He could voice what he felt and help me express what I felt, too. But above all he was warm. And this warmth was what I needed after my long, frozen marriage.

Normally I would have waited until after the kids went to bed, but we had something important to discuss. Hadrien had called my lawyer for an update. I had finally hired a lawyer in Montpellier, and as my French was not good enough to allow me to understand all the legal language, Hadrien had begun to translate the finer points of the negotiations as they progressed. What I wanted remained the same: for everyone to stay in Aubais, or at least in the general area, so that Alex and Nico could live with both parents, keep their friends and their school. Nikolai didn’t want to stay in France. At first he said he wanted to move to Bulgaria. Then he told me he was planning to move back to Providence. Then he changed his mind again. Now he planned to go to Sofia, as originally planned. He wanted a lump-sum payout for his part of the house, plus alimony and child support.

Recently Nico had come to me to say she wanted to live with her dad. He had already promised her a big room in an apartment by a patisserie, and a dog like Fly, and a wide-screen TV, but now he was taking a new approach. “Daddy says he can’t live without me,” she said, her eyes wide with concern. “You have Alex. If I don’t go with him, he won’t have anyone.” Nico was nine years old, and she should have been spared this kind of emotional blackmail, but there she was, telling me her father wouldn’t make it without her.

I knew firsthand how powerful, how magnetic, the allure of a wounded parent could be to a child. My father had been deeply hurt by my mother, and the twelve-year-old Danielle had made a calculation similar to the one Nico was making: My dad needed me more than my mom did. It hadn’t occurred me to that my mother had a different way of suffering, that she hid her pain from me. My father had put on a bigger show, and he had won my sympathy. Now, years later, my daughter had been put in the same position.

“Nico says she wants to live with her dad,” I said to Hadrien.

“Do you think that’s best for her?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not. He isn’t equipped to care for her. But what choice do I have? Drag her through a custody trial? It’s too much for anyone, let alone a little girl. What a nightmare.”

“Well,” Hadrien said, “your lawyer thinks you should give him what he wants financially. And if you let Nico go with him, he’s ready to accept a buyout of the house. It is important to note that a custody agreement can be overturned. The financial agreement, however, cannot.”

“So,” I said, thinking this over, “if I agree to his terms and let Nico go to Bulgaria now, I can come back and reopen the custody case later?”

“Yes,” he said. “And you will have stopped him from destroying you financially. There’s always the option of going back for Nico later.”

Suddenly I heard something push against the bedroom door. I walked over and opened it. Nico jumped, her big brown eyes going wide with wonder. “Mama!” she said. “You scared me!”

“Call you later,” I said to Hadrien, and disconnected my call as I steered Nico inside my bedroom. “Hey there,” I said. “Were you waiting for me?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked at the floor, and she held herself very straight, very rigid, as if she were preparing to dive into a deep, cold swimming pool. I’d noticed that her posture changed when she was with Alex and me. She became stiff, unnatural. My exuberant little girl would become deliberate, careful, as if her words were memorized, her gestures rehearsed. Maybe it was the strain of the divorce. I didn’t know. I only knew that Nico was not the same child she’d been two months before.

“Were you waiting for me a long time?” I asked, wondering how much she’d heard.

Nico nodded, recondite, but didn’t say anything.

“Why didn’t you just knock?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. She sat on the edge of my bed.

“I was on the phone,” I said, sitting next to her. “Did you hear me?”

She looked at me, wide-eyed, and shook her head. Then, realizing that she’d been caught, said, “Well, a little.”

“Did your dad send you up here to listen to me?” I asked.

She shook her head again, with less conviction. I was sure she’d heard much more than a little, and I had to wonder if Nikolai had sent her spying at my door.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I won’t get mad if you tell me.”

She looked up at me, and I knew I could push her to tell me everything that was going on behind the death-mantra door. I knew, with just the right words and just the right looks, with a few promises and hugs, I could extract the enemy plan. She wanted to please me, just as she wanted to please her father. But could I go that far? Could I use my child as an instrument of war? Was anything in the world worth that?

“No,” Nico said. “Daddy didn’t send me.”

I took her in my arms and hugged her. Her father and I had always been the ones there to keep her safe. But now it wasn’t outside forces that threatened her. Now I needed to protect her from us.

THE SPELLS THAT had begun with the burning of my hair on his altar and progressed to the Tibetan mantra knifed into his door continued during our standoff. I would look at my phone and find messages like THE GYPSIES WILL HAVE YOUR SOUL! and I WILL MAKE SURE YOU ROT IN HELL FOR ETERNITY! I would find, interspersed between these messages in English, the Tibetan symbols that Nikolai had carved into his door:

When these symbols first appeared on his door, I had no way to understand them. But now Nikolai sent them to me in a digital format, and I could translate them for the first time. Using my iPhone, I copied the symbols from the text message and pasted the phrase into an online Tibetan dictionary. The definition that came up was: “The seed syllable for the Body of all Buddhas. Die, lifeless, dead, deceased, depart, expire, passed, appeasing, death, quietude.” Maybe these symbols could have been interpreted in a number of ways, but to me they were nothing less than a message of death and destruction. They were threats, death threats, curses and dark spells, incantations for my death. He wanted me to die, to become lifeless, to decease, to expire. He wanted me dead.

Every time one of these threatening messages came to me, I went into a tailspin. Had he actually paid Gypsies to put a curse on me? I remembered what he’d told me in Bulgaria—that people often got revenge by hiring Gypsies to cast spells. What did it mean that he would make sure I rotted in hell for eternity? Were these curses something he’d learned in India? What could they do to me? What if it were more than a curse? Maybe he was sending these threats with a more literal intention. Maybe he was planning to kill me himself.

I went to my computer and began searching for statistics, hoping to calm myself down. There was nothing to worry about, I told myself. People got divorced all the time without actually murdering each other. My parents hadn’t killed each other. In fact, they’d never touched each other, just yelled a lot. I reminded myself that Nikolai and I were both educated human beings, both with master’s degrees, both with many books published, the parents of small children. We were the type of people who used words to solve our problems, not the type of people out to slaughter each other.

But what I found only served to make me more anxious. According to the Web site of the Department of Justice, around 30 percent of women murdered each year are murdered by a husband or boyfriend. One-third of all women murdered! Men, it turned out, were murdered by their wives or girlfriends around 4 percent of the time. One man out of twenty-five! According to these numbers, Nikolai was much more likely to murder me than I was to murder him.

But statistics could not describe us. We had never believed we were like other couples. That was why we’d fallen so hard for each other to begin with. We believed we were special. We didn’t need to play by the rules. We made our own rules. We were reckless, hurting the people we loved—Z and Sam and Rada and Alex and Nico—to get what we wanted. I had always believed we were exceptional, but now I saw that we were just your run-of-the-mill egotistical assholes.

LATE ONE NIGHT, after the kids were asleep and before I called Hadrien for our nightly talk, I ran a bath, undressed, and sank deep into the hot water. It was the only time of the day that I felt removed from the battle, when I put down my shield. I turned the lights off and lit a candle in a corner, letting it cast a low and inconsistent glow across the porcelain tub, the stone floor, the large, liquid mirrors. Running my fingers over my body, I felt the bones jutting through the skin, sharp and unnatural. One foot floated up, rising like an iceberg in a sea, then the other foot. The big nail of my right toe hung askew, loose and blue. Two small nails on my left foot had already fallen off. I didn’t know if I’d stubbed my toes or if stress and malnutrition had caused them to fall off, but my toenails were peeling away, as if they no longer wished to remain part of my feet.

After my bath I looked in the mirror and saw the woman I’d become in the past weeks. There were two deep moons of blue under my eyes. My skin was pale, parchment white, nearly transparent. I was sleep-deprived, underweight, and frazzled. Later, after I’d left the fortress, I had a series of blood tests at the Georges-Pompidou Hospital in Paris and found that I had become severely anemic. I would take iron supplements, start sleeping through the night, and eventually my strength would return. But at the time I didn’t believe that the transformation arose from a physical problem. I believed it was a spiritual one. The toenails, the dizzy spells, the bruises, the thinning hair—these were signs that I was under psychic attack. The words “die, lifeless, dead, deceased, depart, expire, passed, appeasing, death, quietude” worked their way into my consciousness, and I found myself whispering them, repeating them, as if praying. Praying for my own death. I was sinking under the weight of the curse, growing weaker every day, withering away under his black magic. Of course the spell had no objective power. Its only power was in its ability to work its way into my head and infect my thinking, to make me believe that it existed, to spook me. If I didn’t believe in its power, it would disappear in a puff of smoke.

But in the bath I didn’t want to think about curses and spells. I just wanted to float in the warm water and imagine that I was far away from the fortress, far away from my life and the seemingly insoluble problems that lay ahead. Far away from the quickly unfolding divorce and all the back-and-forth between his lawyer and my lawyer as they negotiated an agreement under Article 230 of the French Civil Code, divorce by mutual consent, divorce amiable. Far from the guilt I felt about what I was doing to Alex and Nico. Far from the judgment and condemnation of people—Lord and Lulu and Jules and Yana and Ivan and everyone else—who didn’t understand that I had been pushing a boulder up a hill for years and who now, as it rolled back and flattened me, blamed me for the reverse momentum.

I didn’t want to think about any of that. I wanted to think about Hadrien, the man who made me laugh, the person whose voice helped me forget everything. He was clean of this mess. He had never been to the fortress, had never walked over the cracked tile in the kitchen. Had never seen ghosts. He didn’t even believe in ghosts, and—come to think of it—neither had I until I’d stepped into this house. He was sane. He was kind. He was free of this poisonous place.

I sank deeper into the water, the heat lapping at my chin. The room was still, tranquil. I put a washcloth over my eyes and leaned back against the cool porcelain, rubbing the knots out of my neck. My mind drifted through the house. I imagined each room, envisioning the kids’ rooms, the attic playroom, the piano in the salon, the Paris-Lyon door, the stone stairwell with its steps as smooth as river rocks. I saw myself walking down the steps. My feet were bare and, suddenly a hundred little hands slipped out from the darkness, tiny translucent fingers straining to grasp my ankles as I walked. They were trying to grab me, to trip me, so I would tumble down, down into the shadows.

A strange sensation, cool as a breeze, swept over my skin. The mistral, which often slipped through the edges of the old casement windows and cut through the steamy air, wasn’t blowing. No, the night was still and tranquil. It was something else, a presence, a consciousness lurking in the ether. I opened one eye and saw a leg. I opened an eye a little more and saw a hand. Opening both eyes, I found Nikolai standing above the bathtub, gazing down at me, his black clothes cut from shadow, the whites of his eyes glowing in the candlelight.

I gasped, terrified, and sat up. I clutched my knees to my chest, covering my body, sending a wave of water splashing over the edge of the bathtub. How long he’d been there, staring at me as I floated in the bath, I didn’t know. It could have been thirty seconds or five minutes.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked, holding my legs tighter to my chest.

Caught in the candlelight like an otherworldly creature, Nikolai stared at me. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said, his voice gentle, sweet. It sounded like the voice of the man I’d met long ago. “Can we talk?”

“What in the hell are you doing?”

“You’re so beautiful,” he said. His expression was pained. He found me beautiful, and this hurt him. “I wanted to tell you that.”

“You can’t just come in here when I’m in the bath!”

“You’re my wife.”

“Get out!” I screamed, splashing water at him. “Get out of here. Now!”

After Nikolai left the bathroom, I wrapped myself in a towel, walked to the hallway, and locked the Paris-Lyon door between the first and second floors. Each night after, I would repeat this gesture, fastening the lock on the door, securing my territory. The Paris-Lyon door became our new border, a definitive point of entry to our respective jurisdictions. I was in Paris. He was in Lyon.

EACH NIGHT AFTER the second floor was locked securely, I made the rounds, checking that the windows were latched, turning off the lights in the living room, turning on the night-light in the hallway, kissing Alex and Nico a second time, and adding more water to Fly’s bowl. It was a nightly ritual, like scouting the perimeter of a campsite to make sure the wolves were at bay.

After the surprise visit during my bath, I taped my scorpion protection mandala to my bedroom door and put the mala mirror in the hallway, between the kids’ doors. I had no idea how to use the mala, and so I hung it at eye level, so as to check my teeth or my hair should the need arise. The mala refracted light across the stone floor, sending wavering white disks over our feet when we walked downstairs. A mystical disco ball.

Although Nikolai had given me these gifts months before, I had never taken the time to learn what they were meant to do. My astrological sign is Scorpio, which is probably why he’d given me the scorpion protection mandala, but I’d never understood the symbolism of a scorpion. One afternoon before the kids came home from school, I looked it up online and found that the main symbol of the scorpion is defense. A Web page about animal symbolism described the scorpion physique as threatening and tough, with its hard, protective exoskeleton meant for attack. The page went on to describe the scorpion method of defense: It holds its stinger high and arched, ready to strike. Another Web site suggested that the essence of the scorpion is like a ninja in black, swaying its tail, silent in its approach, striking quickly and decisively. After I read this, I felt a shot of confidence every time I walked past my scorpion protection mandala. I was a badass scorpion ninja warrior, ready to sting.

But despite my tough exoskeleton, I was taking a beating. Earlier that afternoon I’d fainted on the stairwell. I was climbing the steps, and suddenly everything around me began to drain away. I felt my fingers slip along the smooth wooden banister, a slow, sweeping release, and then I hit the floor. I woke a few seconds later with Nico screaming my name, standing over me, afraid. Nikolai heard the commotion, stepped out of his office, glanced at me lying on the floor, turned, and walked away, leaving Nico to help me stand up. I spent a long time with her afterward, assuring her that I was okay.

And I was. Sort of. By nightfall I was sore everywhere, and a new bruise spread over my shoulder. I collapsed into bed, exhausted and stiff. Turning on my lamp, I picked up a book from the stack near my bed. I tried to concentrate on the words on the page, but they seemed to move and bend, dancing away before I could read them. I willed myself to concentrate. Reading was freedom. It allowed me to imagine I was someone else, a character in some other story than my own. It was my nightly escape. And so I fixed the letters with my eyes, reading the same sentence three times without retaining the meaning before giving up and putting the book down.

I turned the light off, and the room swept away, leaving only the faint outline of a chair, a glint of curtain, a nightstand. Suddenly Fly ran to the side of my bed and barked. His ears stood alert, and his curly tail had gone straight. Something wasn’t right.

I slid out of bed and walked barefoot to the bathroom, to check the window. It was secure, and so I walked out into the hallway, my feet slipping on the cool stone. It was after midnight, dark and quiet. Nothing seemed to be wrong—there was not a sound coming from Alex’s and Nico’s rooms—and yet Fly was pacing around frantic. I bent to scratch the scruff of his neck, trying to calm him down, when suddenly a shadow passed over me, fluttering upon the floor like a black curtain. I looked up, and the shadow coalesced into a tall, dark figure wavering behind the glass door. My heart leaped to my throat. This phantom being, this black shadow standing on the other side of the Paris-Lyon door, staring at me with fixed eyes, was my husband. How long he’d been there and what he wanted, I didn’t know, but I understood one thing: No matter how well I barricaded myself upstairs, no matter what divisions I made between us, he was not going to leave me alone. I met his gaze and held it for a long moment. He didn’t blink; he didn’t turn away. His expression was uninflected. He stared at me with the frightening neutrality of the walking dead.

I LAY IN bed, anxiety pulsing through me. I waited, expecting Nikolai to materialize from the darkness, to hover like a bat in the dark over my bed, watching me as I slept. But I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake, going in circles in my head about what in the hell was going on. Why had he been there, standing at the Paris-Lyon door, watching? Had he been there for a long time, or had he just walked up seconds before? Had he been in a trance, sleepwalking, high on valerian tea? Was he trying to get past the door or just observe us? He’d stood there watching me. Our eyes locked for thirty seconds or so before he turned and floated back down the stairs, silent, gray as a zombie.

Finally, after an hour of such questioning, I crawled out of bed and walked through the rooms of the second floor, trying to bring myself down, trying to reassure myself that I wasn’t in a horror novel: This man is your husband. He is not a zombie. He is not a vampire, not a killer, not a ghost. This is a man, not a monster. A man.

I went to the Paris-Lyon door and unlatched the lock. A depth opened below me, a cavern of emptiness, a cascade of thick space in the darkness. I grasped the slippery wooden banister, guiding myself down the steps, down into the dark. I wasn’t going to turn on the lights. It might call someone, or something, to the stairwell, and I wanted to be alone.

The stone chilled my bare feet as I stepped into the hallway on the first floor. Everything was still. No light shone from under Nikolai’s office door. He was asleep, or maybe awake in the darkness. I tiptoed past the Death-Mantra Door, walking softly through the salon. Moonlight shone through the windows, over the piano, pooling on the gray floor. Wading through the shadows, I made my way into the kitchen, to the oldest part of La Commanderie, where the thirteenth-century wall rose over the trapdoor. I should have been afraid, but there was nothing at all to fear, and so I knelt on the cool marble floor and lay down over the trapdoor, my cheek against the broken tile. “Come back,” I whispered, hoping the woman in blue would hear me. I needed the sense of calm, the comfort, she had promised. I needed her guidance. “Come back. Come back.” But there was no stirring in the air, not the least sign of her existence. There was nothing at all except my voice, whispering.

Later, in my bed, I slept fitfully, my mind filled with terrors. I floated in and out of a place where pictures blossomed like poisonous flowers behind my eyes. I stood with Gretta at the center of the village as a woman was led to a pyre. The villagers circled, waiting, and suddenly there was music and dancing. C’est la Fête Votive d’Aubais! Everyone gathered together to watch the running of the bulls. There was smoke and the smell of tar. A jester called out to the crowd, Back to your houses, the plague, the plague! And then the baby appeared, walking timorously over the roof tiles toward the edge. One leg, then the next, it strained onward to its end. There was nothing I could do to stop it. Nothing at all.

I woke the next morning, a blanket of light streaming over the bed. I hadn’t slept much, and I was exhausted and disoriented, the world of my mind spilling forth into the real world, the two bleeding together, liquescent realities. Where was I? In a dream? In a story? I tried to put all the pieces back together again: You are locked in the top floor of your house, waiting for your husband to leave, holding out to keep your home and your kids, holding out for some kind of agreement. This is just a bad dream. It will disappear when you open your eyes and wake.

ON SCHOOL MORNINGS I pulled myself out of bed and made the kids breakfast. I would make French toast or crepes filled with Nutella, putting everything out on the table before I woke them. They would sleepwalk to breakfast and become conscious halfway through their first crepe, the sugar kicking into their systems. By the second crepe, they would be telling me what was planned at school that day. Fly would be wagging his tail and waiting for one of them to throw his toy squirrel. I would make a second latte at the Nespresso machine. It was times like these, when my children were happy and energetic, that I felt the most unsettled: How, in the middle of this cataclysm, could everything seem so normal?

On one such morning, I made the crepe batter—two eggs, flour, milk, and a pinch of salt—and then set the table. I’d just put the orange juice on the table when I looked out the window at the courtyard. Fly and the cats were roaming under the micocoulier, but there was something else that caught my eye. Parked near the Citroën sat Jett’s blue Peugeot. I was so surprised that I opened the window and looked closer, as if to verify that it wasn’t a hallucination. Jett’s car was never on our property anymore. We had virtually stopped talking in the past six months. She hadn’t called me back earlier in the week when I’d phoned. In fact, during our last conversation she told me that I shouldn’t call to discuss Nikolai with her, that she wanted to remain neutral. She said she was staying out of our war. But there was her car, right there.

Nikolai had people at the house all the time. Once when I made the mistake of venturing out into the courtyard during aperitif hour, Lord confronted me about the fact that I had filed a report at the gendarmerie. Apparently my complaint had been read aloud at the mairie, at some sort of local council meeting, and everyone in the village knew the details of Nico’s time in Venice and Bulgaria. “Shameless,” Lord said, shaking his head. “To embarrass your husband in public in such a manner. Utterly shameless.” I understood what he was saying. He believed that I should keep quiet about what was happening. He believed that I should keep up appearances and pretend that everything was fine. I knew that this was the way things were done in many marriages, because that was how things had been done in mine for the past decade. But I wasn’t interested in appearances. Trying to shame me into silence and secrecy wasn’t going to work. Not any more. I told Lord to go to hell and walked back into the house.

There had been a party in the courtyard the night before, but I hadn’t known that Jett had been there. I wiped my hands on a dish towel and walked down the hallway, past the Paris-Lyon door, down the stairs, to the first floor, Nikolai’s turf. There were voices coming from Nikolai’s office, low whispers, and the thought entered my mind that there had been something strange, something a little too familiar, about Nikolai and Jett over the past year. Since I’d been away for my book tour, actually. I remembered a weird moment the previous fall when Nikolai had told me he didn’t want Jett coming to the house anymore because she was “too desperate”—or was it that her pheromones were too strong? I could hardly recall. Of course. Too many pheromones. Overwhelming.

I knocked twice on the death mantra and turned the doorknob, fully expecting it to be locked, but it wasn’t: The door opened a crack, just enough for me to see a nude Nikolai as he lunged at the door, slamming it shut in my face.

I knocked again, and for some reason—probably shock creating a short circuit in my brain—the only thing to come out of my mouth was this totally absurd sentence: “Can you two keep it down? I’m trying to make the kids breakfast!”

After some scrambling and urgent whispering, the door was flung open and they shot out like bulls in a rodeo. Nikolai shoved me backward, and Jett ran from the office down the hall, Nikolai scurrying after her, slamming the door to the salon shut and locking it. Click.

I pulled myself up from the floor, stunned. It took a minute or two—as much time as it took me to get back upstairs—before I realized that I had just found my not-yet-ex-husband naked, in his office, with my so-called friend. I expected as much from Nikolai, especially now that we were officially separated, but Jett? How many afternoons had we drunk wine and bitched about men together? How many times had she encouraged me to leave Nikolai so that I could be free?

I was going over in my mind what had just happened, as if double-checking the numbers of some complicated algebraic equation: I heard them, then I knocked, then I saw him naked, and then I informed them that they needed to be quiet because I was making breakfast. This calm, mathematical approach was a cover, a kind of shock-absorbent cloak that I put on to buffer me from the explosive core of red-hot pain and anger that was rising through me.

Back upstairs, the kids were waking. “Good morning, sunshine,” I said to Alex, trying to put on my best happy-mommy face while feeling that I’d been punched in the gut.

“What was all that noise?” Alex asked. He usually woke early and probably had been awake when I was making the crepe batter.

“Just your dad locking the doors again,” I said. “You want crepes?”

“Yeah!” Nico called from her room, where she’d been listening. “With Nutella!”

“And whipped cream.”

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” I said.

I made the crepes and began serving them when the full extent of my anger hit me: My friend is in my husband’s—okay, my estranged husband’s—bed, and I am making crepes? What was wrong with me? I needed to go back there and get that woman out of my house.

But when I went downstairs, the door to the hallway had been locked. Nikolai must have bolted it from the other side. And so I marched up the stairs, back through the Paris-Lyon door, through the kitchen, passing the kids—Brush your teeth when you finish with your crepes—stomped out the back door to the terrace, took the exterior staircase down into the courtyard—which was littered with empty wine bottles from Nikolai’s soiree the night before—to the table under the micocoulier tree, where Jett and Nikolai were drinking coffee and smoking.

They looked painfully hungover, their clothes wrinkled, the buttons done up the wrong way. The rage I’d felt just moments before drained away. I felt a sudden urge to sit down and have a cup of coffee with them. Despite the fact that I hated them at that moment and wanted to kill them both, I had once liked, even loved, these people. Considering that I was falling in love with Hadrien and wanted to sign a reasonable divorce settlement with Nikolai, I might even have welcomed the whole arrangement. I wanted my husband out of the house, and this was one way to do it. But as I walked up to them, Jett lifted her liquid black eyes and said, “Did you come to make us breakfast, too, darling?”

That, for me, was it. All my cloaked anger rushed forth. I folded my arms across my chest and said, “Get the hell out of my house, you fucking whore!”

Nikolai and Jett stared at me, stunned.

I turned to Nikolai. “How could you sleep with this woman with our children upstairs?”

Nikolai stared at me, his mouth agape. He stammered for a moment before saying, “I was sick last night, and she stayed to help me.”

“Stayed to help you?” I said. “Help you with what?”

“He was having a panic attack,” Jett said.

“Nothing happened,” Nikolai added.

“Ha!” I said, my voice rising. “Jett the nurse! Do you know the same Jett that I know? I suppose you’ve been doing this nurse routine the whole time.”

“Danielle,” Jett said, her voice condescending, “please.”

I gave Jett a look, and the look said, Shut up or I’ll rip that lascivious tongue from your mouth. “I suppose you’ve told him everything I’ve told you over the years. How perfect. Two spies in bed together!”

Jett started shaking her head. “I didn’t tell him anything—”

“I told you to get out of my house!” I screamed, and Jett half stumbled from her chair. They were really, truly, pathetically hungover. It must have been some night.

“You know what? Actually, bring him with you. You can have him,” I added as she started to walk away. “Because I don’t want him. I am having the most fantastic sex I have ever had in my life!”

Nikolai stood up, knocking his chair over. “So you admit it!”

“Yes, I admit it, I have slept with Hadrien, and he is fabulous in bed,” I said. “Incroyable.”

Nikolai looked at me, his face growing redder by the second.

The public acknowledgment, sotto voce, that I was having amazing sex after years of a nearly celibate marriage was so liberating, so freeing, that I said it again, rephrased. “I had no idea sex could be so good!”

“You fucking bitch!” he screamed. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough to ruin my life already?”

“Get out of here!” I shouted, pointing to the blue gate. “Out!”

“Demon!” he screamed, coming at me, his face beet red as he pushed me backward. Jett, who had edged closer to Nikolai, made a grab for him and pulled him back.

“Come on, Nikolai,” she said, taking him by the arm and steering him away. “Calm down. Let’s go. Calm down.”

Nikolai stared at me as Jett escorted him to her car. And as he left, his eyes fixed upon me with pure hatred, I could have sworn I heard him whispering the death threat he’d carved into his door, the mantra he’d texted me: “Death, decease, terminate, extinguish, die.”

AFTER NIKOLAI AND Jett had gone, I collapsed into a lawn chair. The confrontation left me utterly exhausted. For half an hour, I couldn’t move, and so I stared into the courtyard, at the roses in bloom, the waxy gloss of the oleander’s flowers, the huge dead cypress tree with its resident crows circling. The whole courtyard was blooming with flowers. The jasmine vines were a mess of tangled fragrance, the smell of rosemary hot in the air. It was paradise, the same paradise that had drawn me to the village to begin with. I couldn’t help but remember our first day in Aubais, and how I had fallen so deeply in love with the sounds and smells and colors of our village. It hadn’t been just the beauty of the place, but the promise of what we could become there that had so moved me. I loved it still, loved it the way one loves a prized childhood memory, one that has been slowly warped by the act of growing up.

I didn’t have many close friendships at that point in my life, partially because I’d moved around so much and partially because I spent my free time with my husband and children. But when I made a friend, I cherished that friendship, and truly cared about that person. Jett was one such friend, and I had liked her despite her flaws. I had liked her when she gave me the wrong advice and when she was judgmental about my life. There’d been many reasons to be critical of Jett, but I hadn’t been. I had trusted her. Jett was my closest friend in Aubais, and her betrayal cut deep.

Eventually Alex and Nico came downstairs, their backpacks on, ready to go to school, but I told them to go back upstairs and play, that they were staying home. “Today,” I said magnanimously, “is a free day.” Alex and Nico looked at me in astonishment. Never in the history of their school experience had I said such words. But the day a woman finds her husband—estranged husband—in bed with her friend is an instant holiday for everyone. “Go play!” I said, and when they stared at me as if I’d gone mad, they were not far from the mark.

When I finally left the lawn chair, I found my phone and composed the following text message: AS YOU PROBABLY KNOW, NIKOLAI AND I ARE GETTING DIVORCED. IT IS NOW CLEAR TO ME WHY: I JUST FOUND HIM IN BED WITH MY FRIEND JETT. I then sent this message to all our friends in the village and beyond, friends I hadn’t spoken to in months, friends who might or might not have known that Nikolai and I were having trouble at all, let alone getting divorced.

I sent it out and waited for responses to roll in, the waves of support and sympathy, the indignation. Never mind that my message was total nonsense: Nikolai and Jett could have been sleeping together for months, but that wouldn’t have been the cause of our divorce, just as Hadrien wasn’t the cause. We were the cause of our divorce. Our pride and stupidity. Our selfishness and egotism. It was our fault. We’d been building walls to keep the world out, but we were our own worst enemies.

I checked my phone, looking for responses to my text. Surely this information would bring everyone back to my side. Soon they would stop by the house to see if I was okay, and my friends would hug me, and we would laugh and cry together at the horrors I’d been through these past weeks. They would understand that I’d been wronged. I would be vindicated.

The first message to come back was from Lulu. It was short and to the point: JETT? I DON’T BELIEVE IT FOR ONE SECOND.

I read the message again. She didn’t believe it? What, did she need pictures of his naked ass? Well, I didn’t really believe it either, and I had actually witnessed it, so I couldn’t blame her for doubting. I wrote back, BELIEVE IT. I JUST WALKED IN ON THEM.

I would have written a more extensive response to Lulu, but another text came in from a female friend, an artist who had been through a difficult breakup some years before. She wrote the comforting: ☹.

I sent a quick text to Hadrien, who had heard about Jett during our phone conversations, saying, JUST FOUND NIKOLAI IN BED WITH JETT. He responded, LOL. AT LEAST IT WASN’T THE BABYSITTER.

The babysitter. That was someone I had not included on the group text message. I took out my phone and was retyping the message, customizing it for Sveti, when it struck me how ridiculous this whole thing had become. I had just sent an electronic newsblast about Nikolai’s sexual activities to all our friends, people who could not have cared less about what Nikolai or I do in the bedroom. I was doing exactly the same thing that Nikolai had been doing to me for weeks—using our friends as ammunition for our battle. It was a mistake, a big mistake. I’d written the text in a rage, and I regretted it. I’d written the text in weakness and fury. I’d tried to embarrass Jett and attack Nikolai, and in so doing I’d made myself into exactly the kind of person I didn’t want to become.

In the beginning, when we’d discussed the separation over our bottle of Bollinger 2002, I’d wanted an honorable separation, one in which we admitted that we’d failed but acknowledged the fact that we’d tried to build something beautiful and meaningful. I’d wanted to keep the idea of our efforts—our noble and outsize and romantic and ridiculous attempt at love—safe. I’d wanted to separate as friends and go on with our lives in dignity. And while Nikolai’s behavior over the past weeks had hurt me, I had been determined to stay above it: I was not going to stoop to his level. I had intended to walk with my head held high. But now there I was, in the mud with him, thrashing and sinking in the filth.

THE REST OF the day slipped by me in a haze. I lay in bed, thinking and staring at the ceiling, going into a spiral of anger and self-recrimination. I wanted to get out of bed but couldn’t move. A weight pressed on my chest, pinning me to the mattress. My limbs were heavy, filled with lead. The thought of facing the outside world was too overwhelming to imagine. The weight on my chest became heavier and heavier. It was a stone, fixing me in place as the dirt rained down, cold and hard, covering my legs and arms, my face. Soon I would be hidden. Soon I would be buried alive.

Looking out the window, I saw that the sky was already growing dark. I’d spent the entire day stewing in my own acid, dissolving in the wash of anger and shame and guilt. The worst part was that kids had surely heard us fighting. They had probably witnessed me screaming at Nikolai and Jett and the two of them leaving together. No doubt they’d heard me crying in my room after sending the text message and heard the crash when I’d thrown my phone at the wall. I wanted to justify my childish actions, to blame Nikolai or Jett for them, to find some excuse for what I was doing to Alex and Nico. But I knew, even then, that I was hurting them. My actions had consequences. They were not subject to revision. And this knowledge made me feel more worthless than I’d ever felt before.

If only it had been possible for the ghost of my future self to appear in that darkening room and kneel at the side of the bed to comfort me. She would have stroked my hair and whispered in my ear that everything would be okay. She would tell me that it was not too late to salvage my life, that Alex and Nico would be fine, and I would be fine, too. But maybe I did hear some hint of my future self, just a whisper through the layers of time, because even at that weak, dark moment I was grasping for her, longing for what she would teach me. I would fight to find her, this woman of the future who had burned away the layers of self-pity and delusion until just the blackened, roasted marrow remained. One day I would meet that woman, and we would embrace as sisters who had descended to hell and emerged new.

BY THE TIME Nikolai came upstairs later that day, I had worked myself into a state of despair. He knocked on the Paris-Lyon door, calling my name. I pulled myself out of bed and unlatched the chain lock, so we stood together at the doorframe, he on one side, me on the other. He wore the same clothes he’d had on that morning, the wrinkled T-shirt and the black jeans and sandals. He looked every bit as hungover as he’d been when he left, only now he wasn’t screaming and cursing me. Now he was calm. He smiled weakly. “I’d like to talk to you.”

“Talk?” I said, looking up at him, not quiet able to trust the gentle tone of his voice. It was the exact opposite of the cacophony of emotions banging in my brain, the atonal noise of self-recrimination and anger. “Talk about what?”

He shoved his hands into his pockets. “This standoff needs to end.”

It needs to end. The phrase swirled in my mind. My thoughts were growing circular and frenetic, until they seemed less my thoughts than an echo in the house. It needs to end.

“We need to end this,” he said.

Yes, we need to end this. His voice was hypnotic, soft as a whisper. Had he actually spoken? Or had I imagined his voice telling me that this needs to end? It’s karma. It isn’t even our choice. We’ve been waiting many lifetimes for this chance.

“Danielle,” he said. “Do you hear me? We need to end this. We need to sign an agreement.”

Something in my brain snapped. I said, “How is this ever going to end?”

“We need to make an agreement,” he said. “Now. Here.”

“Tell me—does it look like we’re ever going to agree about anything?”

He gave me a tender look, one that reminded me of the Nikolai I’d known ten years before, the pleading, vulnerable Nikolai. The Nikolai who had begged me never to leave him. “I don’t know what you’re holding out for,” he said. “I mean, even if you get what you want—and you stay here in the house with Nico and Alex and I leave—how are you going to manage by yourself? This is a medieval village. It isn’t easy to be alone here. You’ve lost all your friends. You can’t even open the gate without help, let alone manage this house.”

I began to laugh, a sick and twisted laugh, as if I’d been inhabited by a demonic spirit. “Do you actually think you’re such an enormous help to me? You’re even less helpful than Sveti. If Sveti works twenty-five hours a week, that will be way more assistance than I’m getting from you. I’m going to be just fine.”

“But Sveti won’t work for you,” he said, and it seemed to me that his eyes filled with a joyful glimmer, as if he’d been waiting for just the right moment to tell me.

“What do you mean?” I said, leaning against the Paris-Lyon door, in need, suddenly, of its support. “Sveti’s going to stay on and help me.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?” I said, my stomach sinking.

“I’m sorry,” he said with fake contrition. “But she told me last weekend that she wasn’t going to be working here anymore. She doesn’t want to be in France after the divorce. She said it was too sad to see kids suffer through this kind of thing.”

I stared at Nikolai, speechless. For some illogical reason, Sveti had become the linchpin of my plan to stay in France. In my mind I could lose my husband and still manage my life there if I had help from a strong, competent woman like Sveti. For some reason the possibility of finding someone else to help me was unthinkable. In my unbalanced state of mind, I had fixated on Sveti. In truth my feelings had nothing to do with the nanny, but at that moment, in that state of agitation, Sveti’s abandonment was all I could see. I needed her, and only her, or everything would fall apart.

“Are you telling me Sveti quit?” I was losing control, and words came out as one astonished proclamation.

Nikolai nodded.

“How could she quit now? This is when I need her the most. She knows that I can’t stay here alone without her!”

“She’s decided to go back to Bulgaria with me,” he said, a smug look crossing his face. Or was it a compassionate look? I was so twisted up, so trapped in my head, that I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

“What is she going to do in Bulgaria with you?” I asked.

“I’ll need her help with Nico.”

“But you’re not going to have Nico,” I said. “Nico is going to be here!”

“My parents hired Sveti,” he said, looking at me with contempt (or was it concern?). “She’s Bulgarian. You can’t even speak to her. Did you really think she would stay here with you?”

Something about the way Nikolai said this, in combination with the noxious emotional fumes of my day, ignited in me. “You stole her!” I shrieked. “You fucking stole Sveti! You know I can’t make it without her, and you convinced her to leave!” I was incensed, illogical, all the emotions I had battled to hold back spilling forth. For the first time in all the weeks we’d been fighting, I burst into tears in front of Nikolai, big gulping sobs. “How could you do this to me? How could you fucking steal the babysitter?”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Hold on, I didn’t steal—”

“This is all part of your master plan, isn’t it?”

“Master plan?”

“To take everything piece by piece. To rip away my entire life until I have nothing, nothing left!”

“Danielle, I—”

“What else do you want from me?” I shrieked. “You’ve brainwashed my daughter, you’ve stolen all my friends, you’ve taken over the house. You’ve spent our savings. You drank my wine. You’re waging a smear campaign against me. What else do you want, Nikolai? Do you want my limbs, too? My arms? Maybe a few fingers?” I thrust my hand into his face, as if offering the fingers to him. “Take them! I don’t need them anymore.” I was working myself into a frenzy, going up and up and up, raising the tone of my voice until I was the mezzo-soprano of an Italian opera, screeching with pain and betrayal. “Tell me: What else do you want now that you’ve stolen Sveti?”

Nikolai started to back down the staircase, slowly, gingerly, regarding me with the frightened look of an animal at the end of a rifle.

“Congratulations! You set out to destroy my life, and now you’ve done it.”

“Hold on,” he said. “Just hold on a minute.”

“You really want to win this game of chess?” I walked to the edge of the staircase and flung one leg over the slippery wooden banister railing, feeling the pull of gravity under me. The drop was deep, onto stone, a long, hard fall. “Why don’t we get this whole thing over with right now!”

“Danielle,” Nikolai said, taking another step backward on the stairs. “Calm down.”

“And one day when our kids ask what happened to their mother, you can tell them that you drove me to this, you drove me to kill myself. Is that what you really want? To kill me?”

“No,” he said, still backing down the staircase. “I don’t want that. Just calm down.”

I threw my other leg over the slippery balustrade and felt, suddenly, a weightlessness, the vertiginous sensation of being a bird perched on the ledge of a skyscraper. I could just let go. I could do it. I didn’t even have to think about it. It would be as easy as relaxing, letting my muscles retract. Easy. Easier than crawling back over the railing. Easier than facing Nikolai. Easy.

Nikolai rushed forward, grabbed me by the shoulders, and pulled me backward, onto the floor. We lay there locked in a tense embrace, his arms around me, and for a moment I thought he would lean over and kiss me. The monster would die. The princess would awake. Instead he pulled away, gently, and walked down the stairs. I heard the door slam as he left. I lay there broken, almost wishing that I had in fact jumped.