Part one

My mother’s name is Danielle. She is sixty-eight, she has lived alone for three years in the house in Heusy, on the hills above Verviers, and until this autumn I thought I knew her inside out.

She was an accountant at a textile mill for forty years. She checks her receipts three times. She never gives her card number over the phone, not even to her bank. When Dad died, she handled everything: the estate, the notary, the insurance, without shedding a tear in public.

So when she told me one Sunday lunchtime, as she carved the roast, that she was “seeing someone”, I was pleased. Truly.

“His name is Richard,” she said, blushing. “He’s an engineer. He works on an oil rig in the North Sea. He’s a widower too.”

“And where did you meet?”

“On Facebook. In a gardening group.”

I kept smiling. But something tightened, somewhere under my ribs.

“And have you seen him? In person?”

“Not yet. He can’t leave the rig. But we write to each other every day. Every night at ten o’clock, he sends me goodnight.”

He had never seen her. He had never spoken to her on the phone. And she had already sent him twenty-three thousand euros.

Over the following weeks, I watched Mum change. She had her hair cut shorter, with copper highlights. She bought a green dress, she who had worn nothing but navy since the funeral. She hummed while she did the washing-up. She had started planting bulbs in the garden again, for the spring, “for when Richard comes”.

She was happy. I hadn’t seen her happy in three years.

And I was afraid.

I only discovered the twenty-three thousand euros three weeks after that Sunday. By chance. She had asked me to help her print a tax return, and when I opened her laptop, her banking app was still open.

Five transfers. Four thousand, then six thousand, then three thousand, five thousand, five thousand. All to different accounts. Two in Belgium, one in the Netherlands, two in Spain.

“Mum. What are these transfers?”

She went bright red. Then completely white.

“It’s a loan. Richard has had some problems. His accounts are frozen because of a tax inspection in England. And then there were the customs fees for his parcel, and his daughter’s hospital, in London… He’ll pay it all back. As soon as he comes off the rig. In December.”

“Mum. It’s a scam.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Neither do you!”

She snapped the laptop shut. She had never looked at me like that.

“He knows me. He knows things about me that you don’t even know. Go home, Céline.”

I rang my brother in Montreal from the car, parked outside the house, engine off. It was midday there. He listened without interrupting.

“Twenty-three thousand?” he said at last. “Mum? Our mother who counts the change at the baker’s?”

“Our mother who counts the change at the baker’s.”

“She won’t listen to you, Céline. She never listens once she’s made up her mind. You’re going to need proof. Real proof.”

I drove home to Liège. And I spent the night investigating.

The Facebook profile of “Richard Holloway” had existed for seven months. Profile picture: a handsome man with greying temples, tanned, in a hard hat, in front of a steel-blue sea. Twelve friends. No posts before March.

I did a reverse image search. Within thirty seconds, I had found the man. His name was Mikkel, he was a dentist in Aarhus, in Denmark, and his holiday photos had been stolen for years. A Danish victim support group had even published a warning with his face: “This man is not Richard, nor David, nor Michael. He is a married dentist who has never asked anyone for money.”

Then I did something I’m not proud of. I created a fake profile too. A sixty-five-year-old widow from Spa, with a picture of flowers. I joined the same gardening group. And I waited.

It took four days. On the fifth, “Richard Holloway” sent me a friend request. On the sixth, a message: “Hello dear lady, I have seen your lovely roses, you have the heart of a gardener, one can see it.” On the seventh, he told me he was an engineer on a rig in the North Sea, a widower, alone, and that he believed in the meetings destiny sends us.

The same words. The same mistakes. The same destiny.

I printed the Danish warning and the messages my fake widow had received. The next day, I put them on Mum’s kitchen table.

She read them. For a long time. Then she pushed the pages away.

“Anyone can do that with a computer.”

“Mum…”

“Do you want to know how I know it’s him? Because he calls me my Danou.”

My Danou.

It was the pet name Dad gave her. No one else used it. It wasn’t a family nickname; it was a word between the two of them, a bedroom word, a seven-in-the-morning-in-the-kitchen word, an old-couple word. I had heard it all through my childhood without ever daring to use it.

“How does he know that name, eh?” said Mum, and her voice broke. “I never told him. Never. The first night, he wrote to me: ‘Goodnight, my Danou.’ Exactly like Jacques. Do you think that’s a coincidence? I think it’s a sign.”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking.

Who knew that nickname? Dad, who was dead. Mum. My brother Laurent, who has lived in Montreal for fifteen years. And me.

Four people in the whole world. And one of them was dead.

There had to be someone else. Someone who had seen, or read, that word.

I looked around me, in the kitchen of my childhood. The fire brigade calendar. The radio. Dad’s portrait on the dresser, in its wooden frame.

And that was when I understood who Richard was.