She Took My Place

Marquette-lez-Lille, a Saturday in November, 11.10. After three weeks in Lille University Hospital, Nadia Meziane walks out with her head shaved on one side and a plastic band round her wrist: UNKNOWN F. — born 01/01/1990. She was found on 17 October on the bank of the Deûle, with no papers and a wound to the back of her head. She rings her own doorbell. A woman opens the teal front door with Sacha, Nadia's fourteen-month-old son, in her arms. She is wearing Nadia's grey cardigan, the one Nadia's mother knitted, and Sacha is turning its mother-of-pearl button. “You must have the wrong house, madam.”

Then Grégoire, her husband, comes to the door. He looks at her the way you look at a delivery driver who's come to the wrong floor, then turns to the other woman: “Nadia, call the police.” In front of the officers, the woman hands over Nadia's identity card. “It could be either of you.” Grégoire swears he has never seen this lady before. And Ambre, fifteen, the stepdaughter Nadia has been bringing up for five years, comes down the stairs, looks at her for a long time and says: “I've never seen her before.”

In the envelope with her belongings there is a dead watch, one running shoe and a gold hoop earring with a wrenched clasp, which she was clutching in her fist when they found her. Nadia has never had pierced ears. Captain Wattez sees only a family dispute and promises nothing. Her friends in Toulouse have had a message from her own phone telling them not to believe her. And the paediatrician saw Sacha on 20 October, with his mum, on a day when Nadia was in a coma. With no papers, no phone and not a single witness, how do you prove you are yourself when everything that proves it is in someone else's hands?

A domestic suspense novel about a woman being erased, a husband who denies her and a little boy who goes to whoever is holding him.

A work of pure fiction: all the characters are invented, the rue des Haleurs does not exist, and no real crime is retold. It deals with an assault, off the page, psychological manipulation, a threat to a young child and an attempted murder, with no sexual content. The characters and events in this novel are fictional.