Part one

“I’m so glad I could chip in to your fundraiser, you know.”

It was a Thursday in November, by the coffee machine on the second floor of the inter-municipal utility where I’ve been doing the accounts for sixteen years. Brigitte, from HR, was smiling at me with that slightly misty smile people save for those who’ve come back from far away. She put her hand on my arm.

“Fifty euros, it wasn’t much. But when I saw that photo of you at Sart-Tilman, with your headscarf… I thought, we’ve all got to do something.”

I smiled. I said thank you. I had no idea what she was talking about.

I never received a single euro.

I need to explain who Aurélie is.

Aurélie is my little sister. Five years younger than me. A home nurse, always late, always laughing, always with a green folder under her arm. I’ve seen that green folder all my life. At secondary school, she kept her notes in it. Later, her bills, her contracts, her health insurance papers. Aurélie never loses anything. She writes everything down, she files everything, she staples everything.

When they told me I had breast cancer, two years ago, on a Tuesday morning in an office at the Sart-Tilman university hospital, she was the one sitting next to me. Not Fabrice, my husband. Fabrice was driving his bus, the number 4, and hadn’t been able to get away. Aurélie had cancelled six patients.

The doctor said “tumour”, “chemotherapy”, “mastectomy”. I couldn’t hear anything any more. I was staring at a stain on the wall shaped like Belgium. Aurélie was writing everything down in her green folder.

Outside, in the car park, she took me by the shoulders.

“Listen to me, Valérie. You get better. I’ll handle everything. Everything. You don’t have to deal with anything.”

And she kept her word.

For eleven months, Aurélie handled everything.

The appointments. The health insurance paperwork. The certificates for my employer. The shopping on Tuesdays, Noé and Lina’s homework on Wednesdays, the washing when I couldn’t stand up any more. She came with me to every chemo session, with a thermos of mint tea and crosswords we never finished. She shaved my head in her kitchen, in Outremeuse, one evening in February, playing Brel far too loud so you couldn’t hear me crying.

Fabrice did what he could. That’s what I told myself. He came home late, he slept badly, he was often on his phone. He didn’t know what to say to me, so he said nothing. I didn’t hold it against him. Illness frightens men, they say.

One day I asked him if we were managing, money-wise. My salary had dropped to sickness benefit. The mortgage on the house, in Ans, was twelve hundred euros a month.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s fine. We’re managing.”

And Aurélie, next to him, was filing a bill in her green folder without looking up.

I’ve been cured for a year now. Complete remission. My hair grew back, curlier than before. I went back to work in September. I thought the worst was behind me.

That Thursday, after the coffee machine, I locked myself in the second-floor toilets with my phone. I typed in my name and “fundraiser”.

The page came up straight away.

“Let’s help Valérie fight!”

Underneath, there was a photo of me. A photo I’d never seen. I was asleep in an armchair in the day hospital, bald, grey, with the drip in my arm and my blue headscarf slipping off. Someone had photographed me while I slept.

The text said I was “a brave mum”, that “illness doesn’t give any warning”, that “the family needed help to cope”. It didn’t say exactly with what.

Amount raised: 38,412 euros.

Six hundred and fourteen donations.

I scrolled down. My colleagues. The mums from school. The butcher on Rue Saint-Gilles. My old piano teacher. People I didn’t even know. Twenty euros, fifty, a hundred. A “Courage Valou, thinking of you” from my godfather, who lives on his small pension in Seraing and had given three hundred euros.

And right at the top, in small grey letters: “Fundraiser created by Aurélie D.”

I sat on the toilet lid for forty minutes. I thought of all the times she had said “I’ll handle everything”. I thought of her new car, a little white Fiat, bought last spring. I thought of her holiday in Crete, in August.

Then I came out, picked up my coat, and told my boss I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t a lie.

I crossed the Meuse on foot, over the footbridge, in the rain. I walked up Rue Puits-en-Sock to her place. I knew the door code. I didn’t use it. I rang the bell, for a long time, like a stranger.

While I waited, I kept seeing the car park at Sart-Tilman, her hands on my shoulders, her voice: “You get better. I’ll handle everything.” I had thought it was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to me. Now it made me feel sick.

Aurélie opened the door in her pyjamas, with her glasses on her nose and a pot of yoghurt in her hand. It was her day off. She smiled when she saw me, then she saw my face, and her smile stopped.

I held out my phone, with the page open. My photo, bald, asleep. The 38,412 euros.

“You took a photo of me while I was asleep,” I said. “And you asked six hundred people for money. My godfather. The butcher. In my name.”

She didn’t deny it. She didn’t even look at the screen. She put her yoghurt down on the shoe cabinet, very slowly.

“Where’s the money, Aurélie?”

She looked over my shoulder, towards the street, as if checking that no one had followed me.

Then she said, very quietly:

“Does Fabrice know you’re here?”