But our lives no longer belonged to us alone. Perhaps two weeks after my meeting with the policemen from Nanterre in November 2022, I saw my lawyer discussing our story on a sensationalist cable TV show called True Crime Tales. Another lawyer came on after her and made the connection between these two cold cases and the Mazan rapes. It was all too much. The glare of publicity that I was trying so hard to avoid. Things being conflated. I was certainly not seeking to deny anything – I didn’t want to disguise the facts – but I wanted to be accorded a little time, restraint and discretion. I was going at the pace of the justice system, not the media. The woman they were talking about on television, who ‘had been raped two hundred times’, everyone constantly banging on about the number as if it was a world record – two hundred times! – was obviously me, but I couldn’t reduce myself to that. I felt betrayed by the way my lawyer portrayed me. I was fed up with her sound bites, her willingness to speak into any microphone held out to her, the great battle between women and men she claimed to be waging. And I was still terribly angry with her for leaving Caroline alone for hours with the file of images of all the violence done to me. I didn’t feel she was protecting us at all. The next morning, I sent her a curt message informing her that she no longer represented me. It was over.

  Some of my friends went into a panic and told me I couldn’t do this alone, that I didn’t know anyone else who could represent me. I replied that I would speak for myself, if need be. I had no backup plan. I didn’t for a moment imagine the judicial maelstrom that I was about to be sucked into. But I trusted my instincts. I could sense what was good for me and what wasn’t.

  It was the friends I’d made on the island who picked up the pieces. Within a matter of days someone put me in touch with a man called Antoine Camus. He was a corporate lawyer, rape cases were not at all his area of expertise, but my friend said I could call him for advice; she’d told him about me, he’d be happy to talk and would point me in the right direction. So one day, towards noon, I dialled his number. He listened as I told him what had happened, how my life had imploded, all the questions I had, and about the videos I couldn’t bear to watch. He barely interrupted me. He came across as tactful and reserved. I asked him if he thought it was essential that I be represented by a woman. The answer was clearly no, given that after an hour of discussion he offered to take on my case. He explained that he would join forces with a colleague who was more experienced than he was in the criminal courts. So now I had a new lawyer. And soon I would have two. My second lawyer was also a man, called Stéphane Babonneau. A few days later, the three of us had a video call. They were in their office in Paris, and I was in my little house on the Ile de Ré. Two dark-haired men smiled at me from my phone screen, while being careful to maintain a tone of professional detachment. I was old enough to be their mother. Once again, I was frightened at the thought that they would watch the videos, ashamed that they should see me like that. But this time I felt a sense of reserve emanating from their side of the screen too. I had the unfamiliar sensation of taking charge, such a contrast to the last two years of doing whatever I was told. Finally things were starting to come together. But the past was getting even darker.

  Thirteen

  I had never told anyone about a recurring dream I used to have when we lived in Mazan. A man and a woman turn up at the front door. They ask whether my husband is home. ‘It’s about a complaint to do with a woman,’ they say.

  And then I’d wake up.

  The nightmare would fade and I’d get out of bed. In the kitchen, the breakfast table had been set the night before. It was doing its job: the day was already on track to be a good one. Dominique would probably go off with some local friends on one of his bike rides up Mont Ventoux. We were retired now and no longer had to worry about his professional misadventures. When we moved to Mazan in 2013, we left all that behind us, though his debts still pursued us.

  And yet, he would sometimes heave a deep sigh and say that life hadn’t been fair to him, he hadn’t been given a chance. I hardly paid any attention. Even when he wondered aloud why my pension was higher than his when he had always worked so hard, I didn’t respond. To my mind, if anything we were rather lucky to be where we were, together, alive, looking out on that magnificent landscape.

  By this time my ordeal had already begun, though I knew nothing of it. My only concern was about my unexplained blackouts and memory loss. And of course I didn’t connect them to that new obsession he had developed since we moved to Mazan, of taking pictures of me when I came out of the bathroom in my bra and pants. I didn’t like it, I always asked him to stop, and he would eventually put away his phone. But always with a sigh, saying that I ought to be happy because not a lot of men our age still lust after their wives. He was flattering me and my fixation on happiness. As for the nightmares, I had always had them.

  But that one came true. Ten years later, the police did call on me about my husband. They might have turned up twenty years earlier, if the investigation after Dominique had assaulted the young woman had come to anything. Time was nothing but a tangled skein.

  I often think back to two occasions when Dominique came home crying. I’m pretty sure both times were during the 1990s, but I can’t recall the precise dates. No matter how hard I try, or how often, I can’t remember what year it was. Had he just committed the unthinkable? Had I completely missed something? Both times he told me he had lost his job and I did my best to cheer him up. I remember I was in the middle of making dinner. For me, the memory of Dominique’s tears came to be associated with the delicious smell of gratin dauphinois baking in the oven, his sadness confused with the taste of comfort food, as if things could only get better. All’s well that ends well around the dinner table.

  I couldn’t bear to see him so miserable. I needed to give him confidence, protect him. I suppose right from the start I was protecting him, when I’d send parcels from Paris containing a fancy cigarette lighter and a bottle of Fabergé Brut cologne to the young man adrift in the countryside. In a way he was always that young man in my eyes, and never more so than when he came home depressed after yet another setback. He aspired to much more than just another new job, I knew that better than anyone. He wanted to be an entirely different person, not an electrician who people called when something broke, like his father, the man who ended his working life fixing washing machines. But all his big plans came to nothing. I, on the other hand, worked hard and was steadily moving up the company ladder. I’d changed, I was stronger, I had new skills and more status. Dominique never openly expressed any bitterness or rivalry, but the further back I go, the more I can see how the arcs of our lives were diverging. And I see how I was trying to redress the imbalance between us. Trying to make him feel better about himself, time and time again.

  At the end of 1999, EDF encouraged me to apply for a job in a newly created department for the supply chain management of components for nuclear power stations. I was told the job was mine if I wanted it, though I still had to go through the formalities of the application and interview process. I wasn’t sure I did want it. I made up all sorts of reasons why I shouldn’t apply. I didn’t feel up to it. I wasn’t ready for a promotion. It seemed natural to everybody else at work, but to me it felt like a leap into the void. It’s not for me, I kept telling myself, erasing all thought of how far I had come, all the knowledge and skills I had acquired over the past twenty years. I shrank from the title of the new role they wanted me to take on: ‘logistics executive’. It was so far from the lowly secretary I was when I first started, the diffident young wife working to top up her husband’s salary. It was blindingly obvious how much I had changed, but I somehow found it difficult to come to terms with the woman I was now.

  I was under pressure from within the company to go up for the job. Eventually I had the interview. It lasted for two long hours. When asked if I could see myself in this new position, I replied that I could, but I was sure I wasn’t the most qualified applicant – there must have been others better suited to the role. I was still holding back, standing in my own way. But in the end I was the one they offered the job to.

  ‘Why me?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘You were the most honest,’ said Séverine Brachet. She was a young engineer who had recently graduated from a prestigious university, and we would be working together as a team from now on. I never felt any disparity between us, despite all her impressive degrees. We complemented each other: she was hot-blooded and liked to push things through by force of personality, while I, as always, smoothed things over. Everything pointed to the fact that I was right where I belonged working with Séverine. I had no reason to lack confidence at work. My insecurity came from elsewhere. Only I was bathed in the glow of success, while Dominique was still searching so desperately for it.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was not long after I had started in my new role that Pascale came into my office to tell me I should be asking questions about my husband rather than always putting him on a pedestal. I think it was that word, pedestal, that I couldn’t bear. No one had the right to insinuate that I had somehow misjudged him, to cast doubts on him or on our relationship, which was the foundation of my life. I was doing all I could to keep it strong. I would always protect Dominique from any criticism. Was it because the structure had already begun to teeter that I threw Pascale out of my office in such a rage? Did it take just one word from her to make it topple? I didn’t want to hear anything about it.

  Even if I had asked her a few questions that day, even if she’d told me that my husband had made advances towards her, it wouldn’t have changed anything. I’d have told Dominique, he’d have lied, and we would have stayed together because that was what I really wanted, what I clung to. Maybe I would have kept Pascale as a friend. She probably wouldn’t have come on holiday with us any more, or even been welcome at our house, and we would have needed time to adapt before starting again on a new footing, but our friendship wouldn’t have been severed so abruptly. We would have seen each other at work, exchanged niceties, occasional bits of news, and gradually, without even noticing, we would have started confiding in each other again; maybe even more than before, as women do when they’re among themselves, away from men, all the banal little everyday things that in my case, over time, might perhaps have alerted her.

  Instead I chose to erase Pascale from my life. I told her never to speak to me again. I underestimated the importance of friendship. I don’t think I was very different from many other women of my generation in this regard. The principal axis of our lives was the man we had married or were hoping to meet. And I went much further than that, locking myself into a long tête-à-tête with Dominique. Back then it was impossible for me to imagine that those who suffer could turn against the people who love them.

  I drove home from the office that evening in tears. I asked Dominique to explain what Pascale might have meant. I wanted the three of us to talk things through. I thought he must have another mistress, which would have been the most straightforward and least upsetting scenario. I thought he was the one drifting away from me, rather than me from him. I couldn’t forgive myself for the lover who had come into my life, and now I was rejecting the friend I’d thought of as a sister. Dominique didn’t want to talk about it, he was furious with Pascale, said terrible things about her. It was all out of proportion, and so I chose to backtrack, to make light of it, as always. To preserve our relationship. I dropped the subject. And so Dominique drew me back to him, while I isolated myself from everyone else, without him even having to ask. As if we were just starting out in life, united against the whole world, each the other’s redemption.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had leapt for joy in 2003 when a man he’d met while he was working for the telephone company offered Dominique a job running his business. Dominique thought he was being handed an enormous amount of responsibility. But once again it didn’t take long for it all to fall apart. He soon realised he was just a front man for the company. The person he had gone into partnership with was writing cheques left, right and centre. The business was foundering, and Dominique along with it. Months of unemployment followed.

  By now our nest was almost empty. Caroline had recently met Pierre and moved in with him. David, who had moved out a long time before, was married to Céline. Florian was seventeen and still living with us, though in the way of teenagers he was hardly ever around.

  Around this time, EDF announced that it was selling off its company housing. We urgently had to find a new place to live. By a stroke of luck, Céline and David, who both worked in property, soon found us a little house nearby in Noisy-le-Grand. We were able to carry on living close to the river Marne that we loved so much. Dominique was now spending all day on his own in the new house, which was empty of both children and memories.

  The following year he was rushed to hospital with appendicitis. The surgeon called me immediately after the operation to tell me he had found a tumour and removed an entire chain of lymph nodes. Dominique had lymphoma. I decided not to tell him when he came round from the anaesthetic, and asked the doctor and our children to do the same, to give him time to regain his strength. I was afraid he would give up. When he was finally told about his condition he was surprised. ‘You were full of smiles when you came to visit,’ he said. My old defences in the face of illness, no doubt. My need to protect him, still.

  He recovered well, and a year later decided to set up his own telephone and electricity company. It was a sign he was in remission. He suggested I take on the role of company director in name only, a proxy appointment he needed to register the company. But it was illegal for someone in full-time employment to do this, so he asked Florian, who was still a student. He agreed. The children were worried about their father and promised to help out. We were all in this together. The company was domiciled at our address. We had to move again, this time to another, larger house in Noisy-le-Grand that sat on a corner, meaning it had two front doors and two addresses, ours and that of the company. As if, at home, he had already taken on a double identity.

  But it was for a good cause. He found a new business partner, rather more trustworthy than the last, who had links to an architectural firm that sent them clients. He even took on two trainees. The office was always busy. And the house filled up too, when Céline and David moved in with us while their new house was being finished. Céline was pregnant. Nathan was born on July 12th 2006. We were grandparents, we had a grandson, and I was overwhelmed with happiness. Once again we had a tiny little boy under our roof learning to smile. Everything was going well. Even Dominique’s business was doing just about all right.

  I laughed one day when he said to me, ‘Why are you always in trousers? You really don’t make the most of yourself. You ought to show off your legs.’ I laughed but he was incredibly insistent. I told him to get lost when he suggested filming us having sex. But it didn’t raise any suspicions. There was nothing unusual in couples wanting to spice up their sex lives. I sometimes overheard young women at work talking about these things, how they’d watch the video afterwards with their partner. I enjoyed spending time with women a decade or so younger than me, I liked their optimism and energy. Sometimes, listening to them, I found them more liberated, and I wondered if I was too prudish and inhibited. Dominique’s suggestions occupied that grey area where the other person seems to be telling you how much freer and less uptight they are than you. But ultimately I had no problem refusing.

  I thought things were okay between us, and we had got over the worst – infidelities, unemployment, bankruptcy, illness. We were still formally divorced and had never seriously considered getting married again until one day Joël’s son, Adrien, Dominique’s nephew, brought up the idea. He was very insistent about it, playing around with my lucky number seven, and eventually he came up with the idea of us holding the new ceremony on July 7th 2007. We did exactly as he suggested. Various people, particularly our children, had been asking for a while if we were going to remarry. It’s difficult to imagine today but to lots of our friends we seemed like the perfect couple. They saw us laughing together, dancing le rock’n’roll or the Madison at the drop of a hat, whereas lots of people our age who had been together for as long as we had gave the impression they could barely stand the sight of each other. Caroline liked to tease us that we were still a couple of teenagers. I liked hearing her say that. Children have no idea what their parents were like before they came along, but we gave ours a glimpse of how genuine and strong our relationship had been from the moment we’d met.

  Joël officiated in the ceremony room of his town hall in Charentilly, a little town in Indre-et-Loire that had been built around a chateau with round towers and pointy roofs and a large park, very similar to Azay-le-Ferron. The backdrop was the same, but time had passed. Joël’s mayoral sash was a stark reminder that he was now a local dignitary, something that Dominique would never be – just one more thing to add to all the others that had marked their differences since childhood.