Part one

“Claire, darling… what did you die of?”

My aunt Josette asked the question the way you ask the time. It was 7:20 a.m., a Tuesday in October. I had the phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder, and both hands on the frozen shoulder of Mr Castaing, my first patient, who was wincing on the table.

“Sorry?”

“It’s in Sud Ouest. The death notices page. ‘Claire Simone Barrère, passed away on 18 September in Bordeaux, in her thirty-fifth year. The funeral took place in the strictest privacy. No flowers or wreaths.’”

She sniffed.

“I spilt my coffee all over the tablecloth. And then I thought, you’d never have got yourself buried without telling your aunt.”

I laughed. Mr Castaing laughed too, without understanding. There are whole pages of Barrères in the Bordeaux phone book. Someone with the same name, a misprint, a student prank.

Then my aunt added, more quietly:

“They put Simone, Claire. Who knows your middle name, apart from us?”

I wasn’t laughing any more.

I need to tell you who did know my middle name.

Mélanie. Mélanie Delprat, my best friend since our first year at the lycée. Twenty years of friendship. Summers in Lacanau in her mother’s old Peugeot 205, break-ups cried over on the quays, her wedding where I was her witness, her father’s funeral last year, where I held her hand. Mélanie signs everything with a big M that looks like two waves, with a line underneath, like a beach. She was already drawing it in the margins of our physics exercise books.

Two years ago, I burnt out. I was working at a physio practice in Caudéran by day and at a care home in the evenings, and I spent my Sundays filling in insurance claim forms. One February morning, I sat in my car in the practice car park, unable to turn the key. I was crying without knowing why. I stayed there for two hours.

The doctor signed me off for six months. I couldn’t open an envelope any more. The post piled up on the table in the hall. Just seeing my bank’s logo made me want to throw up.

Mélanie turned up one Saturday with canelés still warm from the oven and a form.

“Power of attorney over your account,” she said. “You sign there. I’ll take care of everything. You sleep.”

I was the one who handed her the pen. I can still see her two-wave M next to my shaky signature, and I remember how relieved I was. For six months, she opened my post, paid my rent, filled in my health insurance paperwork. She had my PINs, my passwords, a copy of my ID card, my payslips. I would have trusted her with my lungs.

When I went back to work, I never cancelled the power of attorney. I never opened the banking app again either. Mélanie used to say, “Don’t worry, your account’s breathing.” I had no reason not to believe her.

Between two patients, I looked my name up on the newspaper’s website.

The notice was there, framed in black, between a retired notary from Libourne and a ninety-eight-year-old woman from Pessac. Underneath was a space for condolences where nobody had written anything. That was almost the most frightening part. My death hadn’t moved anyone, because nobody had seen it.

I rang the notices department. A soft-voiced woman called Évelyne checked.

“The notice was ordered online and paid for by card, madame. I can’t tell you who by. But I’ll take it down straight away, of course.”

“So you can kill off anyone you like? All you have to do is pay?”

There was a short, offended silence.

“No, madame. We always ask for proof. A letter from the undertakers, or a copy of the death certificate. We have it on file.”

“Send it to me.”

“Not over the phone. Come into the office with some ID and I’ll show it to you.”

She added, without a trace of irony:

“Seeing as you’re alive.”

I cancelled my afternoon patients and went home, to Rue Kléber in Saint-Michel, to fetch my ID card.

In my letterbox, between a pizza leaflet and the electricity bill, was a white envelope addressed to my flat. But not to me.

“To the heirs of Madame Claire Barrère.”

I opened it on the stairs, under the light bulb that buzzes.

It was from a credit company I had never heard of, Sofilo Crédit, in Lyon. “Please accept our sincere condolences. Following the death of our client, the borrower’s insurer has covered the outstanding capital on contracts no. 7718-04, 7718-09 and 7731-02. These contracts are now settled. No sum will be claimed from the estate.”

At the bottom, a table. Three personal loans. The first signed in April, two years ago. The second in June. The third in September. Outstanding capital, covered: 46,300 euros.

April, June, September. The months when I couldn’t open an envelope.

I sat down on a step. I have never borrowed a single euro in my life. Someone had borrowed 46,300 euros in my name. Then someone had killed me so as not to have to pay it back.

And that someone knew my middle name.

The newspaper office smelt of paper and cold coffee. Évelyne was a small woman with short grey hair and red glasses on a chain. She looked at my ID card for a long time, then at my face, then at the card again.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “In thirty years in this job, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She turned her screen towards me.

It was a death certificate. A real one, by the look of it. The city’s coat of arms, the blue stamp of the registry office, the words “Full copy”. “On the eighteenth of September two thousand and twenty-six, at two o’clock in the afternoon, at her home, Rue Kléber, died Claire Simone Barrère, physiotherapist, born in Bordeaux, single.”

My profession. My address. My mother’s maiden name.

And at the very bottom, a line I had never read in my life: “Drawn up on the nineteenth of September, upon the declaration of Maud Fabre, friend of the deceased, who, having read it, signed with Us.”

I don’t know any Maud Fabre. I followed the line to the declarant’s signature, half swallowed by the stamp.

A big M shaped like two waves. With a line underneath, like a beach.

It was Mélanie’s signature.