Chapter 39
In the house next door, the sun had set on the pitiless gleam of the shards of a long-moribund marriage, where two people who were once in love now saw in each other nothing more than a threat, an ordeal, danger.
They ate dinner in silence, for every single word Tiphaine or Sylvain uttered, brimming with shame, concealed in its syllables a potential wound.
They were contaminated by a history that refused to remain in the past. That evening, the dead came, uninvited, to join their meal; the dead, whose absence filled their hearts and their minds.
A little boy with a broken body, whose empty eyes obstinately refused to meet those of his mother.
An elderly man, his features frozen by the violent ending of his life when he left behind the prison of his flesh.
A sallow young woman, eaten up from within by the poison of suspicion.
A man with a broken neck, garroted by the bonds of friendship.
All four took their places at the table, miming the act of eating, bringing invisible forks laden with nonexistent food to their lips. Tiphaine watched them, lost in the transitory meanderings of her penitence, grief, and guilt.
“Well, you’re a bundle of fun tonight,” muttered six-year-old Maxime.
“That’s enough, Milo, don’t push it,” said Sylvain, without looking up from his plate.
Tiphaine looked up, shocked, to see the adolescent sitting opposite her, taken aback by the impossible metamorphosis.
Maxime and Milo merged before her eyes, the smile of one, the expression of the other, the years that separated them, their voices echoing within her head in a demented chorus.
“Are you okay, Tiphaine?” asked Milo, looking at her with concern.
She shuddered. “Are you talking to me?”
“Um, yes,” he replied, surprised by the question.
“Why are you calling me Tiphaine?”
Milo cast a startled glance at Sylvain, who was staring miserably at his wife.
“What do you want me to call you?” Milo asked.
“Maman. I want you to call me Maman.”
“That’s enough, Tiphaine,” said Sylvain.
She gave him a look of profound sadness.
“What do you mean, that’s enough? Every child calls their mother Maman.”
“Yeah, they do,” Milo said, on the defensive. “Except you’re not my mother.”
Tiphaine trembled at this strike, devastated by the cruelty he was raining down on her, these words, like daggers, spat out in a loathing born of unrelenting bitterness. Why did he hate her so much? She had done nothing wrong.
All she had done was forget to close a window.
As soon as the meal was over, Milo went up to his room, with no intention of coming back down again.
The atmosphere in the house was so suffocating, it was making his life a constant misery.
They’d obviously had another fight, but this time it looked serious.
And there was the visit from that guy who was probably the last person to have seen his father alive.
Inès’s father. Life could be so strange sometimes.
Milo drew out the attorney’s business card from the back pocket of his jeans and thoughtfully spun it between his fingers.
What an idiot he was to have gone to see Inès.
What would she have been able to tell him?
She wouldn’t know anything. And he had promised himself not to have anything to do with her anymore, to protect her from his feelings, which put her in danger.
A bit like he’d done with those two downstairs, who were clearly going to end up destroying themselves, consumed by their destructive relationship, the poison of passing time, the memory of Maxime.
The whole thing was toxic.
Milo gave a bitter laugh. He must never give in to the siren song of love. The happiness of love is a lure, a lie we tell our children so as not to scare them. Love breeds nothing but torment, sadness, and despair. Love causes devastating harm.
Downstairs, Sylvain cleared the table, put the dirty dishes and flatware in the dishwasher, and scrubbed the saucepans.
Tiphaine sat at the table staring into space, while various devious solutions unspooled in her mind.
She had to grab the sword of Damocles that hung over her head and decapitate the problem.
Definitively. With a sharp blow, without any missteps.
Shut up that despicable lawyer once and for all, in the most horrible way possible. And so find peace.
But first she would have a little fun. Something she hadn’t experienced in a long time.
“I’m going up to bed,” Sylvain said in a toneless voice. It was very early, but she didn’t reply. Sylvain looked at her sadly for a few seconds, then left the room.
Tiphaine sat, caught up in her fantasies, soothing her misery by envisaging various ways of hurting the attorney. Glimpsing the end of this nightmare. He shouldn’t have attacked her, threatened to tell Milo everything, stuck his obnoxious, lawyerly nose into her business. He shouldn’t have done it.
She was going to make him suffer. He had no idea what she was capable of. What she was planning would destroy them both, him and his bitch of a wife.
In the middle of the night Sylvain woke with a start.
He was soaked in sweat, his heart was beating abnormally fast, and he was struggling to breathe.
He felt for the lamp switch and turned it on.
The other side of the bed was empty. Tiphaine hadn’t come up.
He sighed, kicked off the covers, and went downstairs.
She was lying on the sofa underneath a blanket.
The message was clear: from now on they would be sleeping apart.