ANIA WAS HOME BY EARLY AFTERNOON. She was no longer accustomed to the stress, and Clara’s temerity had exhausted her. The stores were all closed when she passed the exit to the train station, where the empty boxes from the morning market were piled up. The sidewalk in front of the building had been rinsed with a hose and life had settled into the rhythms of sleep until the following day. She found Novak on the phone in her bedroom and Théo with his nose in a console, sitting on the floor in the middle of a large puzzle whose borders remained unfinished on two sides. The blinds had remained shut; the apartment looked as if it had been steeped in a gray haze all morning long. She was surprised, however, to find that the dishes had been washed and the beds made.

She crouched down next to Théo and surprised him with a kiss on his shampooed hair, allowing herself to be knocked over by the tender savagery of his response. He had turned around and gotten to his knees, facing her, examining her eyes like the watcher that he was of her moments of anxiety and sorrow. Ania took his hand and got up. The upheavals of the past two days were beginning to exhaust her vigilance, and she didn’t want to cry in front of the boy.

Novak soon joined them in the kitchen, an empty cup in his hand. He looked like the bad old days, like a man up to his old tricks, his body impatient, his eyelids a bit brazen beneath brows raked by a series of fine scars. The comments about Gabriel on the television had made him edgy. But that their names would appear on the announcement pleased him a great deal. “Nobody understood what he was trying to say,” he explained sententiously, pulling on the crotch of his track pants. Ania stared at him with a hint of pity. He had so little idea of what Gabriel might have had in mind. With the years, and as she had begun to acknowledge the world of difference that separated her and Novak, no matter what she might want to believe, the ability to wound had passed from him to her. This discovery—the beginning of a slow return to a humdrum existence—had filled her with sorrow.

Théo continued to hold on to her, clinging to her waist, his cheek against the warmth of her flesh, obsessively examining his father, who was standing near the door, the father who was never on time, who had never learned to approach him without making him jump. Novak smiled as he played with the pockets of his jacket. Ever since Ania had told him to get out of their lives, he always seemed to arrange it so that she had to chase him out again whenever he showed up. “Are you going to inherit the house? The place is worth money,” he opined, with an expression of candor and boastfulness. Ania said nothing, no longer having the patience for his unwarranted swaggering. For that matter, she didn’t know if the house would be hers anytime soon or how Novak could claim anything from it.

THE TWO OF THEM HAD JUST MOVED when Ania had finally decided to bring him to Les Épinettes. They arrived in a secondhand van in which they almost managed to kill themselves a few months earlier. The Ping-Pong table had been brought out. Mixed with the freshly cut grass, the decapitated scabiosa spread their bright purple petals in the sun. Several cars were parked in staggered rows beneath the pollen of the linden tree. Gabriel was having company. Ania had known at that moment that they should have left, but Novak wouldn’t have understood. This father, whom he had seen on TV, was part of what made her special in his eyes. And Ania had believed she was protected, because fulfilled, by the kind of transgression that her choice of a man like Novak represented.

It was a hot Sunday in July, too hot to serve the aperitif outdoors. A thin layer of chaff glittered in the light, stirred up by the warm breeze that gave the silver poplars a mirrored sheen. There was a couple Ania hadn’t seen since childhood, and a young woman with narrow, boyish hips who had just come up from the river, a wide Indian scarf wrapped high over her bathing suit. Ania knew only Mireille, a dermatologist who had been her mother’s confidante. She had been present for all the important moments of their life and for many Sunday lunches. For years now, she had arrived together with a man, friendly and distinguished looking, who, like Ania, almost never spoke during those meals.

Ania’s and Novak’s arrival had triggered confusion until they reached the table. They had to wait until Jacqueline added the place settings for the conversations to resume. Novak lost no time in joining, assertive and out of place. With each of his interventions, they listened in silence before continuing where they had left off. Mireille observed him beneath her bangs. “He’s terribly sexy,” she whispered in Ania’s ear, her hand pressing amicably on hers. Her comment sought to rectify what was going on around the table. Ania suddenly found herself completely at a loss.

Gabriel didn’t say a word throughout the meal, planted in his chair, his fingers lightly touching the edge of the table. His jacket climbed up his back, giving him the appearance of a turtle. From time to time, his unflinching gaze scrutinized Ania, making her blush. Although she was clearly suffering, Novak remained silent. He had stretched his arm out along the back of her chair and caressed the nape of her neck with his thumb in a gesture of ownership that left her feeling weak and cold.

Eventually, she made her way to the garden without waiting for dessert. Her father soon joined her. His hands in his pockets, his face critical and smug, he had asked her if he should conclude from this surprise visit of hers that she was going to marry Novak. “Maybe I’ll even be a grandfather,” he joked, stepping back to examine his daughter’s waist with the measured eye of a womanizer.

Then his irony darkened. “Is he Albanian or what?” he asked. Ania didn’t understand what he was driving at and had told him that Novak was Serb. Her eyes had grown cloudy, her concentration wandered. Her father stared at her in silence, examining her inadequacies with incredulity. “I’m asking you if he’s Muslim,” he clarified, raising his eyebrows and rising onto the tips of his toes. Ania had no idea, the question seemed ridiculous. Yet Gabriel had questioned her with an air of insolence that was all too serious. That it mattered whether Novak was Muslim or not, or that it might displease him, was something completely novel to her and, in a way, inconceivable.

NOVAK HAD FOLLOWED THE GROUP of guests who had gone out to the garden for coffee. He sat bolt upright in a rattan chair, not fully realizing just how much of an effect he had made. “He looks like he likes it here,” Gabriel remarked with deadly pleasure, taking Ania by the shoulder. She hadn’t tried to get away from him, not wishing to provide him the opportunity to comment, and together they made their way back to the house as he crushed the layer of dry hay with his toe. “So, my daughter is in love,” he said jokingly in her ear. “In love with a worker from the Balkans,” he added, with mocking admiration.

They left an hour later, during which time Gabriel had shown Novak the property, engaging in God knows what pointless little game, one from which he himself didn’t obtain much enjoyment. Novak returned from the visit strangely agitated and Ania out of love. It was months before she could look at Novak again without feeling the humiliation she had experienced.

When Théo was born, Gabriel had sent Ania a rather generous check together with a long letter, lovely and rambling, in which he explained how much her systematic choices against him had pained him. A few weeks later, he showed up at her apartment. She had only just begun to get used to the baby. Not really believing he would come, she hadn’t bothered to get ready. When he saw her dressed as she was and no longer thin, he appeared to hesitate before coming inside. And yet something intimidating had come between them in that moment spent in an inevitable proximity of skin and scent. Gabriel had been curious about the newborn, had taken him in his arms briefly, moved to rediscover the negligible weight of a life that you could hold in your hand.

The building faced the large bay windows of a municipal pool on which floated the reflections of the water. Beyond was row upon row of buildings, which stopped at the yellow fire of a bed of colza dominated by two interchanges. Gabriel had remained at the window for a long time. Ania had watched him rummage in his pockets and check his car from time to time. He was as solemn as he’d been in his worst moments of defeatism. “My generation is guilty of this ill-considered urban planning,” he concluded gravely as he turned around. “Our civilization is collapsing from it, but try to say something and they call you a reactionary.” Ania had always felt wounded, even weakened, by such remarks. She made a sign to him to stop and, to her surprise, he didn’t insist, didn’t retort, aware of how the authority of his judgment meant little here, where he was no one.

A YEAR LATER, WHEN THÉO’S DEAFNESS had been confirmed, Gabriel had suggested to Ania that they meet at Saint-Lazare. He had learned it from Jacqueline, and sought information from friends. He gave her the address of a special school run by a woman named Michèle, who had had amazing results. More than anyone else, he had succeeded in convincing her that she needn’t feel guilty. Yet he had still managed to forget that Théo was deaf. The incident came back to her now, creating the same sense of pathetic rage that had brought her to tears in the train while returning from their most recent—and disgraceful—visit.