Chapter 1
The Poster
You’re picking up where you left off.
The notary rings on a Friday at eight twelve, while I'm counting the lines of a ledger that won't balance.
Three hundred and forty euros are missing from the accounts of a chain of bakeries in Waterloo, and for two days I've been looking for them with the kind of patience you bring to fishing a ring out of a sink. Three hundred and forty euros on a turnover of eleven million. Marc, the partner I report to, says it's dust. I say dust always comes from somewhere.
“Ms Dervaux? Lise Dervaux? This is Mr Hanquet, the notary in Walcourt.”
I know what he's going to say before he says it. There is only one person in the world who could have given my number to a notary in Walcourt, and she is eighty-seven.
“Your grandmother, Mrs Jeanne Dervaux, passed away last night. In her sleep, the nurse told me. I'm sorry.”
I say thank you. I don't know why people say thank you. He explains that Jeanne left instructions, that she was determined it should be him who called me and nobody else, that she was very precise on that point. Very precise. He says the word twice, as if apologising for it.
“The funeral will be held next Saturday, the eighteenth, at the church in Warnimont. The family is taking care of everything. Your mother asked me whether you would be there.”
The family. My mother.
“I'll be there,” I say.
I hang up and sit for a while looking at the screen. On the spreadsheet, cell G4417 is blinking red. Three hundred and forty euros. Outside, on Place Flagey, a bus opens its doors with a sigh, and a woman runs for it and doesn't make it. I watch her set off on foot, her bag clutched to her chest.
Seventeen years. I haven't been back for seventeen years.
I go back to the ledger and find the three hundred and forty euros twenty minutes later. An invoice for flour entered twice, once on the fourth of March, once on the fifth, by two different people who weren't speaking to each other. It's always that. It's never theft. It's two people in the same room who aren't speaking to each other.
Samir finds me that evening sitting on the kitchen floor, my back against the fridge.
He's come off a day shift for once, and he's bought tomatoes. He puts them on the worktop, looks at the floor, looks at me, and sits down beside me without taking off his jacket. That's what I like best about him. He doesn't ask first. He sits down first.
“My grandmother's died.”
“The one with the biscuit tin?”
I told him about her once, a year ago, at the beginning. I told him she kept her bills in a Delacre biscuit tin and filed them by colour, not by date. I told him nothing else. He remembered.
“That one.”
“Do you want me to come?”
“No.”
He nods. He doesn't ask why. After a while he takes a tomato out of the bag, rubs it on his sleeve and hands it to me, and I eat it like an apple, sitting on the floor, the juice running down my wrist. It's nine o'clock at night. The corridor light is on, as it is every night, and he has never asked me why about that either.
On Saturday the eighteenth of April, I leave Brussels at seven.
I'm wearing a black dress I bought the day before from a discount shop on the Chaussée d'Ixelles, because I didn't own one. I've never needed a black dress. I haven't been to a funeral since my father's, and I was five, and they dressed me in navy because they couldn't find anything black in my size.
The ring road, the A54 as far as Charleroi, then the N5 south. I know the road without ever having driven it. At Somzée the land starts to fold, the fields get smaller, the hedges taller, the houses sink into their gardens like people ducking their heads. Coming out of a bend, a sign says Warnimont-sur-Heure and I feel my hands tighten on the wheel, both at once, as if someone had just braked for me.
I count the street lamps up to the church. There are fourteen. There used to be twelve.
The square is full. People have come for Jeanne, who lived here for eighty-seven years, who ran the haberdashery on the rue du Moulin until ninety-five and knew the waist measurement of half the village. They're in black, in grey, in anoraks, shaking hands with that cheerful solemnity of country funerals, where you mourn an old woman and catch up with everyone. Nobody recognises me. I'm seventeen years older, with short hair and glasses. I've changed the way I walk. I did it on purpose, at twenty, in front of a mirror: I taught myself to walk like someone who isn't afraid of anything. It can be learned. It takes time, but it can be done.
I see my mother before she sees me.
She's on the church steps, in a pearl-grey coat I don't recognise, and she has aged in a way that takes me by surprise: not the wrinkles, I expected the wrinkles, but a way of holding herself slightly bent, slightly to one side, as though she were permanently listening to a noise in another room. She is fifty-eight. She's looking for someone in the crowd. She's looking for me, I realise, when her eyes pass over me, come back, and stop.
She comes down one step. She doesn't come down the second.
“Lise.”
“Mum.”
We don't kiss. We stand a metre apart on the forecourt of the church in Warnimont, and it is exactly a metre, I measure it without meaning to, the way you measure everything when you were a child who measured everything.
“You came.”
“I told the notary I would.”
“Yes. Yes, he told me.”
Her hands are in her coat pockets. I know they're shaking. They were already shaking when I was little; she used to hide them in her pockets, in the washing-up water, in the folds of a tea towel.
And then a man's voice behind me, big, warm, a voice that knows everyone:
“Maxime! Look who's here. Look who's come.”
Maxime comes at me like an overexcited dog.
He was ten the last time I saw him. He's twenty-seven. He's a head taller than me, broad in the shoulders, with a builder's hands and three days' stubble he must have trimmed for the funeral, and he hugs me so hard he lifts me off my feet. He smells of aftershave and coffee. He says my name into my hair, twice, three times.
“You never answered my messages. For years. I thought you were dead, you know? I thought you were dead.”
“I'm not dead.”
“I can see that.”
He laughs. His eyes are wet. He still has the laugh he had at three, a laugh that starts in his belly and breaks in two halfway through, and I feel something give way inside me, something I'd put away so far back I'd forgotten it was there. He doesn't know. He never knew. He was ten when I left, and I'm sure he believed I was leaving because of him.
And then the hand.
It lands on my left shoulder, from behind. Not heavy. Warm through the fabric of the dress. Five fingers, which I count. A thumb that moves a centimetre towards the back of my neck and stops.
“Welcome home, my girl.”
He's said it loudly enough for the people around us to hear. I know because the people around us smile. A woman in a loden coat turns and says to the woman next to her: that's Nadine's girl, the one who lives in Brussels, it's nice of her to come. The other woman says yes, it's nice, and looks at Roger Delcourt with a tenderness I have never seen on anyone's face.
I don't move.
It's the one thing I know how to do, and I do it perfectly. I don't pull away, I don't turn round, I don't tremble. I count. One. The hand on my shoulder. Two. The thumb. Three. My mother looking at her shoes. Four. Maxime smiling at his father. Five. The bells, which are starting to ring. Six. Seven.
At eight, he takes his hand away.
“Come on,” he says. “She never liked people being late, our Jeanne.”
And he goes into the church first, broad-shouldered, unhurried, shaking the mayor's hand on the way in.
I sit in the third row, on the aisle. Not the first. In the first there's my mother, Maxime, and him.
I look at the back of his neck for the whole of the Mass. He's sixty-three, grey hair cropped very short, a thick, clean neck, clippered close. He sings. He knows the words to every hymn; he's sung in the Saint Cecilia choir for thirty years, it says so on the little sheet they handed me at the door: with the participation of the Saint Cecilia Choir, conducted by… He sings in tune. He always did.
The priest talks about Jeanne. About her haberdashery, her buttons sorted by colour, her generosity, her quiet faith. He says she came through hard times, the war, widowhood, the loss of a son, and never complained. He doesn't say that she spent six years waiting for a school bus in the rain to catch sight of her granddaughter's face behind a window. He doesn't know. Nobody knows.
During the sermon, Roger Delcourt undoes his watch.
It's a tiny movement. He does it without thinking, hands resting on his knees, head tilted slightly like a man listening. He slides open the clasp of the steel strap, unfolds it, turns the watch half a turn round his wrist, and closes it again. Click. A little later he does it again. Click. Nobody notices. Why would anyone notice? It's an old man's tic, a gesture of polite impatience at Mass.
I notice. My body notices before I do. I feel my thighs press together under the black dress, my toes curl in the new shoes, my breath shorten by half, like a door being eased shut. I look straight ahead at the stained-glass Saint Martin cutting his cloak in two, and I count the lozenges of lead around his head.
There are forty-six. I count them three times.
At the cemetery it rains a little. I stay at the back.
When it's over, people drift back to the parish hall for coffee and sandwiches, and I walk back up alone to the church forecourt, where I left the car. I won't stay for coffee. I won't stay a minute longer. The notary has given me an appointment on Monday; I'll go on Monday, I'll sign what needs signing, I'll sell the house, and I'll never come back.
That's what I tell myself, walking back across the square in the drizzle. I tell myself in exactly those words. Never again.
And then I see the poster.
It's pinned to the cork board by the porch, between a notice from the church council and an ad for a car-boot sale. A3, colour, printed on glossy paper that has buckled in the damp. A photograph: a new building clad in anthracite panels, big picture windows, a car park, children in red shirts running towards the camera. Above it, the council logo. And beneath it, in white capitals on a blue band:
OPENING OF THE ROGER DELCOURT SPORTS HALL
In tribute to thirty years of dedication to the young people of Warnimont
Sunday 14 June 2026 — 11 a.m.
Speeches, brass band, drinks reception. All residents warmly invited.
I stand in front of the board. The rain makes dots on the glossy paper, and the children in red shirts smile beneath the dots, and I think, without wanting to, with the part of my brain that never switches off: how old are they. Nine. Ten. Eleven.
Dedication to the young people.
Behind me, in the parish hall, someone laughs. I know that laugh. It crosses the wet square, comes through the open door, and settles on my shoulders exactly where he put his hand.
I take out my phone. I open the calendar. My hands aren't shaking. That's something else I taught myself: they don't shake any more. I scroll through April, May, June, and I count, the way I count everything, the days between now and a Sunday in June at eleven o'clock.
I count twice, to be sure.
Fifty-seven.
I get into the car. I don't start it. I watch the poster through the windscreen until the rain has blurred it completely, a blue and white rectangle that says nothing at all, and I understand that I won't be selling Jeanne's house on Monday.
I'm going to sleep in it.