Forty-Six Minus Twenty-Six

Claire Baumann ran along the Doubs six mornings out of seven, and she knew exactly how long it took her.

Twenty-six minutes of running. Two minutes to go down four flights, cross the rue Battant and reach the towpath. Two minutes to come back up. Four minutes in the shower. Forty-six minutes between closing her door and opening it again, with a variation of two minutes depending on the day and the traffic lights.

She did not count that out of obsession. She counted it because it was her job.

There was also the other reason, which she did not call a reason because she had turned it into a routine twenty-two years ago: you do not run five kilometres with type 1 diabetes without knowing how long you are outside, what you ate the night before, and what is in your pocket.

In the front pocket of her jacket there were always two fruit-paste sachets and a pen. That had been the case since 2004 and would be until the end.

Claire was head of logistics at a watch-component manufacturer on the Thise industrial estate, and her work consisted, essentially, of explaining to people why a twenty-minute discrepancy in a supply chain is never an approximation.

On the ninth of October she came home at twenty-five to eight.

She looked at the kitchen clock as she put down her keys, out of reflex, and stopped.

Six forty-nine to seven thirty-five.

Forty-six minutes.

She took off her watch and scrolled through the screen.

Run — 26:03 — 5.10 km — pace 5:06/km.

She stood at the sink with the watch in her hand.

It was not the first time she had seen that gap, and that was exactly the problem: it was the second time in eight days, and the first time she had decided it meant nothing.

The first time, on the second of October, she had put it down to a timing error. She had supposed she had noted her departure wrongly, or lingered downstairs, or that the GPS had taken a while to lock on — which happens, under trees, in overcast weather.

She had told herself that for eight days and had not believed it for a second, because she knew perfectly well that a GPS lock failure produces a discrepancy in distance, not in duration.

She put the watch on the worktop and went to shower.

Coming back, she took a piece of bread from the bag by the coffee machine, and stopped a second time, bread in hand.

She did not remember buying it.

She cast about quickly — the bakery in the rue des Granges, the till, her card PIN — and found nothing. It was not alarming. She had bought bread three times a week for twelve years and would have been incapable of describing a single one of those three hundred purchases.

She ate the bread.

Noé came down at ten to eight, fourteen years old, hair in all directions.

— Did you run?

— Yes.

— How far?

— Five kilometres.

It had been their morning conversation for three years, in that order, every day.

She dropped her son at school at ten past eight and reached the office at twenty-five to nine, and by eleven she was opening a spreadsheet to understand a stock discrepancy of seventeen units on a reference of synthetic rubies, which kept her busy until lunch.

At a quarter past one, in her car, she took up her watch again.

She opened the history and went back to the eighth of October.

8 October — Run — 26:41 — 5.12 km.

She looked in her phone for the time of the message she had sent her son that morning — don't forget your kit bag — sent at eighteen minutes to eight, from the kitchen, after her shower.

Departure at six forty-eight. Message at seven forty-two.

Fifty-four minutes, less four for the shower: fifty.

Twenty-six minutes of running recorded.

Twenty-four minutes elsewhere.

Claire Baumann put her phone down on the passenger seat.

She did the sum twice more, because it was a two-figure calculation and she knew that people get the easy ones wrong.

Then she opened the notes on her phone and wrote:

8/10: 50 min door to door, 26:41 recorded. Gap 23 min.

9/10: 46 min door to door, 26:03 recorded. Gap 20 min.

She looked at the two lines.

In her trade, when a discrepancy appears twice, you stop calling it a discrepancy: you call it a problem, and you work back up the chain.

She telephoned the watch manufacturer during her afternoon break and spent eleven minutes with a technician who explained three times that the device did not lose data.

— Madame, if the activity reads twenty-six minutes, then it lasted twenty-six minutes.

— And if I tell you I was outside for forty-six?

— Then you were outside for forty-six minutes and you ran for twenty-six.

She hung up thinking that answer was stupid.

The next morning she set off at six forty-nine.

It was still dark. The towpath was empty, with the orange light of the lamps on the far bank lying on the water, and a low mist rising to knee height.

She did her two and a half kilometres to the bridge, turned, and came back.

Six hundred metres from the end, where the path runs under the trees, there was somebody.

A woman, standing beside an old labrador, motionless in the middle of the path, looking in her direction.

Claire slowed.

The woman was about forty-five, in a green parka and a woolly hat, and she did not move as Claire drew level.

— You came back, she said.

Claire stopped, a hand at her side, her breathing short.

— Sorry?

— I wasn't sure you would, said the woman.