Chapter 2
Never Seen Her
You’re picking up where you left off.
The police take twenty-two minutes to come, and for twenty-two minutes I don't move from the pavement.
Grégoire shut the door on his sentence. Without any roughness. He shuts doors the way he ends a phone call: politely, and that's that.
I could leave. Find a phone, a police station, somebody. But Sacha is behind that blue door, six metres away from me, with a woman's hand on his back. If I leave, I don't know what I'll find when I come back.
So I stay.
Across the road, on the ground floor, a white net curtain moves. A hand draws it aside two fingers' width and lets it drop. I don't know this neighbour's name. In two months I haven't learnt anybody's name.
My feet are cold. The trainers from the clothing store gape at the heel. In the anorak pocket I still have the two bus tickets, punched. I take them out, line them up edge to edge on my palm, put them away. I take them out again.
At twenty to twelve, a marked police car turns the corner and double-parks.
There are two of them. A policewoman of about thirty, small, freckled, and an older sergeant who hitches up his belt as he gets out.
I go towards them. The sergeant raises his hand, palm out, level with my chest, without touching me.
“Stay right there, madam. Let's all keep calm.”
“I am calm.”
It's true. I'm calmer than he is. I've stopped shaking. When I'm frightened I become precise, and I've never been so frightened in my life.
“My name is Nadia Meziane. Married name Castan. I live here, at the number in front of you. I've just come out of the University Hospital, the Roger-Salengro, where I spent three weeks after an assault. In this house there's a woman who is wearing my clothes and holding my son.”
The policewoman takes notes. The sergeant looks at my skull.
The blue door opens.
Grégoire comes out first, onto the step. She stays a pace behind him, on the threshold, Sacha on her hip.
He holds out his hand to the sergeant. The sergeant shakes it. I see the exact moment Grégoire's handshake does its work: the sergeant nods before he's even said a word.
“Good morning. Grégoire Castan. Thank you for coming so quickly. I understand this isn't pleasant for you either.”
“Do you know this lady?”
Grégoire looks at me. He takes his time. He looks sorry.
“No. She rang the bell half an hour ago, she shouted, she banged on the door. My wife was frightened for the little one.”
My wife.
“Have you got any identification, madam?” the policewoman asks.
She's asking me. I answer looking at the other one.
“Yes. She's got it.”
The woman says nothing. She shifts Sacha onto her other hip, goes back down the hall, and returns with my purse. The brown one, with the seam coming apart at the side. She takes out my ID card and hands it to the policewoman, holding it by the tips of her fingers, almost apologising.
The policewoman looks at the card. She looks at the woman. She looks at me, at my shaved skull, the scar. She goes back to the card.
In the photo my hair comes down to my shoulders. It was 2021, I'd just met Grégoire, I'd had a blow-dry just to go to the counter at the town hall, and felt silly about it.
“It could be either of you,” says the policewoman.
She doesn't say it unkindly. She's stating a fact.
So I recite. It's the only thing I know how to do when the ground moves: exact data, in order.
“I was born on 3 May 1990 in Toulouse. My father's name was Saïd, my mother's Yamina. My son was born on 12 September 2025. He has a café-au-lait birthmark behind his left knee, the size of a two-euro coin.”
The policewoman writes it down. The sergeant has folded his arms.
“The code for the gate is 2202. It's my stepdaughter Ambre's birthday. I'm the one who chose it.”
The woman lowers her eyes. Not in shame. In sorrow. She looks sorry for me, and that's worse than anything.
“She's been watching us for weeks,” she says gently. “I see her on the path in the mornings, when I go out with the pushchair. She must have seen me key in the code. And the birthmark, you can see it when he's in his nappy, at the park, at the pool…”
Her voice is polite, steady. She is as polite with the police as she is with me. When she talks about me, she says “this lady”.
She tucks a strand of her bob behind her ear. My bob, brown, chin-length, cut the way I cut it. In her earlobe a little gold stud glints.
I see it. I don't know yet why I'm seeing it.
“And the hospital, madam?” the sergeant asks me.
“The hospital will confirm it. I was found on 17 October on the bank of the Deûle canal, with no papers. I've only just come out. I've still got the wristband on.”
I raise my wrist. They both read it: UNKNOWN F.
I watch the word make its way into the sergeant's head. Unknown.
Grégoire comes down the step. He puts a hand on the sergeant's shoulder, two little pats, the way he does with a client who's just signed.
“Look. I understand. She's hurt, she's lost, she needs help, anyone can see that. I don't want her to come to any harm. But I have never seen this lady before.”
He says it looking at me. Straight in the eye. He hasn't got the voice of a man who's lying. He has the voice of someone selling me a solution.
“We'll find a solution,” he adds.
The sergeant nods. The policewoman has stopped writing.
I look at Sacha. He's taken his thumb out of his mouth and he's watching me over the woman's arm, serious, the way he watches people who talk loudly.
“She took my place.”
I say it to the police, but I'm looking at her. She doesn't blink.
“She took everything. My clothes, my papers, my son. And he's letting her. I don't know why. I don't know who she is. But ask the hospital. Ask my stepdaughter. Ambre knows me. She's lived with me for five years.”
Silence.
“Is she here, the girl?” asks the policewoman.
Grégoire hesitates. Half a second. It's the first time I've seen him hesitate since this morning.
“She's upstairs.”
From the street you can see the staircase. It faces the front door. I've always found that handy: you know who's coming down before they get there.
Socks on the wooden stairs. Grey joggers. The burgundy sweatshirt from her old handball club in Toulouse, the one she's barely taken off since the move. Her phone in her hand, the clear case covered in stickers.
Ambre stops on the bottom step.
Sacha wriggles in the woman's arms and reaches a hand out to her.
“Bé!”
It's his word for her. He only has three. Ambre doesn't take him. She doesn't even look at him. She looks at me.
The sergeant takes a step towards the threshold.
“Miss. Do you know this lady?”
Ambre is fifteen. I taught her to make scrambled eggs that don't stick. I signed her school planner every Monday for four years. I took her to A&E in Toulouse one night in March, when her inhaler wasn't enough any more and her father was in Bordeaux at a trade fair.
Her eyes rest for a long time on my skull. On the scar. On the wristband.
Her fingers tighten round her phone. She's bitten her nails until they bled. They'd almost grown back when I went out running.
“Ambre,” I say. “Please.”
She opens her mouth. The woman turns and puts a hand on her shoulder. A light hand, flat. The same as on Sacha's back.
Ambre lowers her eyes. Raises them.
“I've never seen her before.”