Part one

On her left wrist, Lou wears an orange and blue friendship bracelet. She tied it the summer she turned ten, at a scout camp near Péruwelz, with her best friend, Zoé. They made two identical ones. They swore they would never cut them off. For three years the bracelets went into the shower, into the sea at De Panne, through the mud of neighbourhood fêtes. They turned grey, frayed, almost see-through.

In February I noticed that Lou was pulling at hers all the time. At meals, in front of the TV, in the car. She was pulling at the threads, one by one, as if she wanted to undo it without cutting it.

That was the first thing I saw. The second was her plate.

My daughter was thirteen. She was in her second year of secondary school, in Tournai. She had stopped eating, she had stopped sleeping, and she had stopped laughing altogether.

The night I took her phone, there were four hundred and twelve messages.

My name is Anne. I’ve raised Lou on my own since she was six, since her father left on a second of January with the car, the dog and a colleague from Mouscron. We live in a flat above a bakery on Rue de l’Yser. In the morning, you can smell warm bread all the way into the bathroom. Lou always used to say it was the best way in the world to wake up.

In February, she stopped going down for the croissants. She stayed in bed until the last minute, left without breakfast, came home at half past four and shut herself in her room. She had lost four kilos in six weeks. At night, through the door, I could hear her phone buzzing. At midnight. At two. At four.

I asked her questions. She answered “I’m fine”, “I’m tired”, “leave me alone”. Once she screamed at me, which she never did:

“You can’t understand! Nobody can understand!”

Then she cried in my arms for an hour without telling me why.

That evening, a Thursday, when she had finally fallen asleep, I took her phone from the bedside table. I knew her code. It was the birthday of the dog her father had taken. I sat down on the cold kitchen tiles and opened her messages.

The account was called “ur_real_friend_13”. No name. No face. For a profile picture, an orange sunset over the rooftops.

The first message was dated 4 January. “Hi Lou. Did you know everyone in class laughs at you? I’m telling you because I’m your real friend.”

Then it never stopped. Ten, twenty, thirty messages a day.

“Nobody loves you.”

“Even your mum is sick of you. She tells everyone.”

“Did you see your thighs in PE? Everyone saw.”

“Zoé only hangs out with you out of pity. She told me.”

At first, Lou had replied. “Who are you?” “Stop.” “I haven’t done anything to you.” Then she had stopped replying. And the account had kept going, again and again, mostly at night.

What froze me wasn’t the insults. It was the details.

“No wonder your dad left. Who’d want to live with you? Even the dog ran off.”

“Loupiotte. That’s cute, Loupiotte. Think the class will find it cute?”

Loupiotte. It’s the pet name I’ve called her since she was a baby. Nobody uses it outside our home. Lou is embarrassed by it. Every year she makes me promise never to say it in front of her friends.

I read until four in the morning. Then I threw up in the sink.

The next day I went to the school. I had printed out forty pages of screenshots. The deputy head saw me in an office that smelled of cold coffee. She leafed through the pages, nodding.

“It’s terrible, madame. Truly. But you understand, it’s happening outside school. On phones. In the evenings. We have no way of knowing who’s behind that account.”

“Someone in her class, it must be.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. We’re running a session on bullying in March, with the school counselling service. In the meantime, I’d advise you to block the account.”

I blocked it. The next day, another account appeared. “ur_real_friend_14”. Same sunset. Same voice.

“Think your mummy can protect you, Loupiotte?”

So I started looking myself.

I made a list of everyone who could know the nickname. My mother, in Ath. My sister, in Brussels. Lou’s father, who hadn’t phoned her in two years. And a few friends I used to tell my life to over coffee on Place Saint-Pierre on Saturday mornings.

Then I took a notebook and copied out the times. All of them. Four hundred and twelve messages, with the date and the minute. I did it for three evenings, at the kitchen table, while Lou slept badly in the next room.

There were a lot of messages at night. But there were also some during the day. On weekdays. At 10:20, at 14:05, at 11:40.

I phoned the year-two pastoral assistant, a kind young woman called Mrs Leclercq. I asked her something very simple: on Tuesday 10 February, at 10:20, where were the pupils in Lou’s class?

She checked. She called back an hour later.

“A maths test, madame. The whole class. And during tests, phones go in a box on the teacher’s desk. Switched off. I checked it myself, I was the one invigilating.”

So it wasn’t a pupil in her class.

I started again with other dates. The swimming lesson. The trip to the Museum of Fine Arts. Each time, the whole second year had an alibi.

It wasn’t a child.

I reread the messages with different eyes. The “lol”s, the “ur so extra”s, the emojis crying with laughter. Suddenly it all sounded fake. Like an adult imitating teenagers they’d overheard on the bus.

That left the profile picture.

An orange sunset over the rooftops. I had looked at it a hundred times without seeing it. That evening, I enlarged it on the computer, pixel by pixel.

In the background, in the light, you could see five spires. Notre-Dame Cathedral. Seen from above, slightly at an angle, from the west.

And in the foreground, bottom left, there was a bit of railing. A wrought-iron balcony railing, painted green, with a small, bent fleur-de-lis in the middle.

I stopped breathing.

I had drunk white wine at that railing. A dozen times. On summer evenings, watching the sun set over the cathedral while our daughters made up dance routines in the living room.

I knew exactly whose balcony it was.