What Is Done with People Who Talk

They met again the following evening, a Wednesday, in the back room of a garage eighteen kilometres from Vellefroy.

There were only six of them. Thomas, Bernard, a woman of about fifty whom everybody called “doctor” and who asked Clara to call her Anne-Sophie, a tall silent man who ran the garage, the young woman in the hood — who did not have her hood on here — and an accountant of about forty called Sylvie who spent the meeting writing.

Nobody asked Clara what she was doing there.

She understood later that this was the worst kind of politeness: you do not discuss what has already happened.