ANIA HAD SPENT THE NIGHT with Théo in the large bed in her parents’ old bedroom. He had woken up several times, anxious about everything—random vibrations, the stillness, the night’s palpable density. It was after nine when Ania got up. She found some sliced brioche in the freezer, several jars of jam, and a chunk of butter that reminded her of the time when her mother was around. The Audi was no longer in front of the house; Jacqueline had left a note indicating that they had been invited to spend the day with friends. In its current state of abandonment, the house sounded different, the atmosphere entirely changed. She went out to the garden to drink her coffee in spite of the wind, which had risen during the night and swept the land with the scent of crumpled straw. It was ten when Chloé phoned. Théo had just come down, pale and angry because he had woken up alone in the bedroom and didn’t know where he was.

The grave had been vandalized, splattered with black paint, and the flowers crushed. Chloé said that there was graffiti on the wall at Les Épinettes. “It’s your retarded neighbor and the people he brought with him to mess up the funeral. They have no business bothering you, you and Clara. It’s liable to cause trouble with the kids in the village.” Ania asked herself where Chloé got the information and if Jean-Louis had seen the graffiti when he left or if it had been done when she was alone with Théo. Chloé suggested she tell Clara, but Ania didn’t want to have anything to do with it. A gust of wind shook a wicker armchair on the grass, and she thought she heard the door to the shed. She promised Chloé she would be careful and hung up, uneasy about not knowing what to do.

Théo was waiting to find out what was going on, listless and cold before the windows that had been pushed ajar by the wind. Ania told him not to worry and to go lie down on one of the sofas, which she covered with a throw. The boy allowed himself to be pampered. His eyes were rimmed in gray, almost black at the corner of his nose. His tongue, thick and white, contributed to the nausea he complained of. Still, he didn’t want to go home, not yet, persuaded that Michèle might yet come, since the burial had originally been announced for that day. He needs so much to be acknowledged, Ania realized, angry with herself for the uneventful life she forced him to lead. Théo began to doze off, his mouth pinched and his cheeks burning. She withdrew her hand from his and sat, pensive, on the edge of the sofa, looking at the tops of the poplars shift with the movement of the clouds. The amorphous sorrow that had accompanied her childhood returned, nearly intact. Maybe she was made of nothing but boredom and anxiety, she thought, as she faced the expanse of silent hours in the stillness of the garden.

IN THE BEDROOM WHERE GABRIEL HAD LAIN, the throw had been taken from the bed and tossed on the day bed together with the sheet that had been hanging over the doorway. Strangely, the presence of Gabriel’s corpse these last few days had made his death more abstract. In the closets, built into the wall on either side of the bathroom, Ania found his bathrobe, his odor, his clothes, and those of Clara: short jackets, jeans, narrow, businesslike dresses, many in beige, almost no true color. The evening before on the telephone, she had said she would stop by to pick up her things during the day. Ania remembered the envelope she had seen her take after the discussion with Christian about her father’s notebooks. She went to sit at the desk to see what she might take with her. As she expected, the marriage photo had disappeared, together with the sheet of pictures of Gabriel and letters of condolence. Gabriel’s mail, however, was still there. Clara hadn’t opened it. You could rely on the fact that she wouldn’t take anything that wasn’t hers. Théo had fallen asleep on the sofa. Ania closed the windows overlooking the garden and went to check on the shed, which was padlocked, then decided to go up to the small room in the attic.

There were roughly ten cartons, scattered here and there, filled with flyers and notices for her father’s campaign five years earlier. There he was in his office chair in front of the precious disorder of his wall of CDs, his chin resting on his fist, his acid gaze, his bare ankles delicate beneath the rough cotton slacks. He had always seen himself like that, and it was what he had always been in the end: cultivated, insightful, inappropriately free of pity and convention.

Her things were there, in plastic boxes labeled by Jacqueline, beneath protective covers—her ski outfit, her little girl’s coats, and an evening dress of her mother’s that had hung for years in Gabriel’s closet. A circular skylight filtered light over these dead things that she would ask Jean-Louis to discard—if not him, then who? Ania felt overwhelmed by her discouragement, like a rush of bile in her throat. Outside, the wind revealed broad swaths of blue sky. She rediscovered the wonderful view from the skylight, almost as tall as the poplars. It overlooked the neighboring properties: the high fields littered with straw, large beds of flowers, some late, some gone to seed, a forgotten hammock between two plum trees, and, immediately behind the reed screening, the house of the artisans, whose flat roof had been cleared of the usual piles of rotting leaves and then recemented. Ania recognized the light green van that she had seen the day before on the shoulder of the road when leaving the cemetery. So they were the idealists Clara had spoken of.

THÉO WAS STILL SLEEPING WHEN ANIA came downstairs, his breath sour and hot. She hesitated waking him so they could take the twelve o’clock train and decided to clean up outside while she waited. At the bottom of the lawn, a silhouette was moving among the trees. Ania could make out Michèle’s slightly detached hunched and slender frame. She walked lazily, while rummaging in the grass, crossing the garden diagonally and stopping from time to time to look toward the house, her arms by her sides, as if she were waiting to be called. Seeing Ania come out to the terrace, she waved her hand. “I’m sorry to come in like a thief, but it was closed on the other side.”

She had used the gate along the river, an entrance that had been abandoned to the weeds for years. Small wrinkles brightened the corners of her long eyelids. “It was a year after your mother’s death and it didn’t last long,” she added, seeing that Ania was beginning to understand that she had come here before, but as a lover. “He was so unnerving but so witty. He hurt me, but I can’t be angry with him, and I was planning on coming to the funeral,” she concluded, backing up, her arms crossed, to examine the façade of the house. Ania couldn’t get over the feeling of peace she felt in her presence. “I want to see if Théo is up,” she said. “He was waiting for you.” Michèle picked up the wicker armchair overturned by the wind and sat facing the river, her elbows resting lightly on the arms, her hand playing with her bangs, and the gnats circling in the light.

Théo wanted to get up right away, was annoyed that he hadn’t brought a change of clothes. His cheeks were starting to take on a bit of color beneath the circles, but his gestures were dulled by fatigue. He had to go the toilet again, then wanted to look for a deck of cards he said he had seen in the cabinet drawer. Michèle rose in a movement of joy, surprised when he came out to join her. She helped him move a small table for his game, taking great interest in what he wanted to show her, then, once he had arranged the cards, she sat down and turned to Ania, who was standing on the terrace steps. “Gabriel called me after years of silence to ask my advice about Théo. Because you weren’t using his name, I had never made the connection.” Michèle stopped speaking to observe the garden and, maybe, examine her memories. A slight smile spread across her thin lips, colored a dark violet. She looked amused, maybe even touched, by the fact that Gabriel could have had a daughter like Ania.

“What do you think about all this?” she asked, smoothing the wrinkles in her linen slacks, as if she were leaving Ania the time or the freedom not to reply. “We came from the same mountains, he and I, went to the same lycée in Clermont. He worked so hard to erase any sign of his rustic origins and achieve a refinement of understanding that everyone ridicules today. I guess that’s what made him so resentful,” she added, as if she had to account for her feelings for him in spite of everything that had happened. She had learned from Novak that the funeral had been moved up a day but wasn’t able to break her other commitments. “Were you worried it would turn out badly?” she asked, closely watching the hand Théo was playing against himself. Then, without waiting for a reply, she moved her head slightly in the direction of the little gate at the bottom of the garden, indicating that, when coming over, she had seen two cars with young men in them, almost like an ambush, over by the neighbors’ property.