Edna feels nothing. She’s neither hot nor cold.
She has caught the 2:03 P.M. train back to Paris. She has just abandoned Rose, Lucien, and his suitcase at old Louis’s café.
All is back in order.
From one moment to the next, Edna has become a widow and childless.
The widow of a man who never existed.
A child without a mother is an orphan. But what’s a mother without a child called? The mother of a child who isn’t hers.
Edna had loved a man she’d borrowed from life. For a few years, she’d flicked a duster over the fingerprints of another woman, but never managed to remove them. Now she’s going to serve her punishment.
Strangely, Edna is neither sad nor happy. She’s full of air. Like that balloon Rose held on a string at the fun fair not long ago. Empty of feelings.
As she thinks of her daughter’s bright eyes, she feels a tear rolling down her cheek and settling on her top lip. Edna swallows it. A balloon now containing a tear.
When she arrives in Paris and steps down from the train, she’ll cut the string that’s keeping her down here, and fly off far, far away. But only once she’s thanked heaven for giving her such a fine present, one day, at the Gare de l’Est.