Part one

Jade had drawn the chalet before she had even seen it.

She was six. She had copied it from the photo in the listing, which I had printed out at work and stuck on the fridge: a brown wooden chalet at the edge of a pine forest, with a balcony, a swing seat and a stone chimney. Jade had added smoke coming out of the chimney, in a spiral, in grey pencil, and three little figures on the balcony. One big, two small. Underneath, in letters of every size, she had written: “OUR HOLLIDAY”.

Noah, nine, had crossed off the days on the kitchen calendar. A hundred and eighteen crosses. I had counted something else: two years of extra night shifts at the care home in Marche, shopping at the discount supermarket, a car I only had repaired when it refused to start. Fourteen hundred euros, paid in advance, for one week. The first real holiday of my life with my children.

It was my little brother Jérôme who had sent me the link, in March. “Look what I found, sis. Cheap, for La Roche. Go for it.” I had called him, nearly in tears. I had told him the exact amount of my savings, proud as a little girl. He had laughed: “See? You deserve it.”

On Saturday 22 August, at 4:10 p.m., in the pouring rain, I parked outside the chalet in the photo, at the end of a gravel track above La Roche-en-Ardenne.

There was already a light on in the chalet.

At first I thought it was the owner. That he had come to switch on the heating and make up the beds.

I ran to the door with Jade’s bag over my head. I knocked. A tall, bearded man in woollen socks opened it. Behind him, a fire was burning in the fireplace. Two blond children were playing a board game on the rug.

“Goeiemiddag?” he said. “Bonjour?”

“Hello. I’m Caroline Dethier. I’ve rented the chalet. For the week.”

He frowned. He called out to someone in Dutch. A woman came, a tea towel in her hand. They looked at each other. Then the man said, very gently, in careful French:

“Madame, we’ve been here since this morning. We rent from Monsieur Collignon. Every summer, for seven years now.”

Monsieur Collignon lived in the little stone house at the bottom of the track. He was at least seventy-five, with a cardigan worn through at the elbows and an old dog that had forgotten how to bark. He looked at the listing on my phone for a long time, his glasses on the end of his nose.

“Those are my photos,” he said. “My wife took that one. In spring, with the daffodils. But I don’t rent on any website, madame. I can’t work those gadgets. I’ve been renting to the same families for twenty years, by phone.”

“But I paid. I have a contract. Stéphane sent me a contract.”

“I don’t know any Stéphane.”

He looked at me with great sadness. Not pity. Sadness, like when you see someone fall and you’re too far away to catch them.

In the car, Noah had pressed his forehead against the window. He had understood before I said it. Children always understand first.

Jade was asleep, her rolled-up drawing in her hand.

I called “Stéphane”’s number. Voicemail. I messaged him on WhatsApp. One little grey tick. Blocked. The listing had disappeared from the site. So had the profile.

I sat in the car, in the rain, my hands on the steering wheel. I wasn’t crying. I was doing sums. I had eighty-seven euros left in my account and half a tank of petrol. No hotel possible. No plan B. Back to Marche tonight, with two children who had told their whole class they were going to “a chalet with a real fireplace”.

Someone knocked on the window. The tall Fleming in socks, under an umbrella. His name was Wim. He came from Ghent.

“My wife has made enough spaghetti for a regiment,” he said. “Come and eat. The children haven’t done anything wrong. Then we’ll think.”

We ate with strangers, in the chalet I had paid for and that wasn’t mine. Noah played ludo with Lotte and Pieter. They didn’t speak the same language, and it didn’t matter in the slightest. Jade showed everyone her drawing. Annelies, Wim’s wife, looked at it for a long time, then went into the kitchen and didn’t come back straight away.

Meanwhile, at the living-room table, Wim and I did what I hadn’t done in March. We checked.

The photos first. Wim ran a reverse image search on his laptop. They came from an old article by the tourist office, published in 2019: “The most beautiful chalets in the Ourthe valley”. Monsieur Collignon’s chalet in spring, with the daffodils. Anyone could have copied them.

Then the number. A pay-as-you-go SIM. Impossible to know whose.

Finally, the bank account. “Stéphane” had asked me to enter “Ardenne Chalets” as the payee. My bank had shown a little yellow message: the name didn’t match the account holder. He had explained on the phone that it was his management company’s account, that everyone got that message. I had clicked “Continue anyway”. Everyone clicks “Continue anyway”.

“The bank won’t tell you anything,” said Wim. “Not until the police get involved. But there’s still the contract.”

It was a nice document. Three pages, a logo with a little fir tree, cancellation terms, a signature in blue. That contract was what had reassured me. A con man doesn’t go to the trouble of making such a nice contract, I had told myself.

Wim opened it on his computer. He clicked on “File”, then on “Properties”.

“People always forget this,” he said. “The document keeps the name of the computer it was made on.”

A little grey window opened. “Title: Rental contract.” “Created: 14 March.” “Author:”

Wim didn’t say anything. He just turned the screen towards me.