Three Weeks to Understand

She went down on the eighth of June with two suitcases and the idea that she would leave again on the thirtieth.

Pauline had taken her patients. Buying the share would wait. She had told her mother she was going to “have a look”, and her mother had said “a look at what”, and the conversation had stopped there the way they had all stopped for twenty years.

Colette gave her the upstairs bedroom, the one that smelled of mothballs, with the iron bed and the wardrobe that wouldn't shut. She had slept in it every summer of her childhood.

— What time do you have breakfast? asked Mathilde.