Part one

I gave my husband a kidney on 14 March. On 2 October, he left me. In between, there are two hundred and two days. I counted them. I teach maths: counting is what I do when I’m hurting.

He told me in the kitchen, one Friday evening, while I was marking my fifteen-year-olds’ tests on linear functions. He had put his jacket on. He hadn’t taken his shoes off.

“Sandrine, I’m leaving. I’m sorry. I haven’t been in love with you for a long time.”

I put down my red pen. I felt the scar that still pulled under my ribs, on the left, when I leant over too far.

“How long is a long time?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He never answers questions with a number in them.

I need to tell you about Vincent.

We met at twenty-three, at university in Lyon. He was doing biology, I was doing maths. He laughed loudly, cooked badly, knew every one of the traboules of the Croix-Rousse, those covered passageways that cut through the blocks, and he would lead me through them at night with a hand over my eyes, so that I had to guess which street we would come out on. We married at the town hall of the 4th arrondissement. Juliette was born three years later. She’s sixteen now.

At thirty-eight, Vincent found out he had polycystic kidney disease. A genetic illness: his father had had it. His kidneys were swelling, filling with cysts and slowly stopping, like a clock nobody winds any more. At forty-two, he started dialysis. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, four hours hooked up to a machine, at a centre in Villeurbanne.

I watched him turn yellow. Lose weight. Fall asleep at the table with his fork in his hand. I saw him cry once, just once, in the car, in the centre’s car park, saying he would never see Juliette sit her baccalauréat.

So I had the tests.

At the hospital, the first person they sent me to see was Coralie.

Coralie was the transplant coordinator, a nurse. The one who links the donor, the recipient, the doctors, the committees. Thirty-four, a blonde ponytail, pink trainers, a reassuring voice. She held my hand during my first blood test. She gave me her mobile number “for those late-night worries”. She had a kind word for everything.

“You’re a four-out-of-six match, Sandrine. Between husband and wife, that’s almost a miracle. Do you realise how lucky you are?”

I believed her. I believed everybody. I went through the scan, the ultrasound, the psychological assessment, the expert committee. In France, if you give a kidney while you’re alive, you even have to go before a judge, at the courthouse, to declare that you consent freely and in full knowledge. I remember the room, on Rue Servient. I remember the judge asking me, “Is anyone putting pressure on you?” And me, smiling. Coralie was waiting for me on a bench in the corridor. She leapt up to hug me, like a friend waiting for exam results.

“No one. He’s my husband.”

The night before the operation, Coralie rang me at 10 p.m. to check that I was fasting and that I wasn’t frightened. She talked to me for ten minutes, softly, as if to a child. While she was talking, Vincent’s phone buzzed twice on the bedside table. He looked at the screen, smiled, and turned it face down. I thought it was a colleague wishing him luck.

On 14 March, at seven in the morning, they operated on us in two adjoining theatres. When I woke up, Coralie was beside my bed. She told me the kidney had “started weeing straight away” inside Vincent. She laughed, I laughed, and it hurt horribly.

The months that followed were the happiest I had known in a long time. Or so I thought.

Vincent got his colour back. He was eating saucisson again, and cervelle de canut, Lyon’s herby fresh cheese. He was walking up the Grande-Côte again, barely stopping halfway to catch his breath. I was recovering more slowly than expected. They had warned me: it’s often the donor who comes off worst, not the recipient. I went back to teaching in May, with a support belt under my jumper.

Vincent went to his follow-up appointments. A lot of them. More than I would have thought necessary. He said it was the protocol, the anti-rejection doses, the blood tests. I didn’t count. It’s the only time in my life I haven’t counted.

One evening in June, he came home at 11 p.m. from an appointment that finished at 5. He said the lab had been running late, then there had been a leaving do on the ward, and he hadn’t wanted to offend the team that had saved his life. He smelt of rosé and of a sweet perfume that wasn’t mine. I put it down to the leaving do. I put a lot of things down to a lot of things that year.

He was distracted. He smiled at his phone. I told myself that was normal: a man who has come back to life is surely allowed to smile at his phone.

And then came 2 October, the jacket, the shoes.

He left with a sports bag and the pot plant from his desk. Juliette shut herself in her room with her music turned right up. I stayed at the kitchen table in front of my tests, and couldn’t mark a single line.

I assumed there was someone. You always assume. A colleague from the lab, someone from university, a woman he’d met on an app. I set out the hypotheses as if they were a maths problem, and eliminated them one by one.

The answer came ten days later, on a Sunday morning, at the market on the Boulevard de la Croix-Rousse.

I was buying onions from a greengrocer when I saw them, in front of the cheese van. Vincent had his arm around a woman’s waist. She had a blonde ponytail and pink trainers.

She turned round. She saw me. She didn’t let go of his hand.

It was Coralie.