During the hearing, Dominique was asked, ‘Did your wife’s extramarital affair change something in you?’ No, he replied. And it’s true that afterwards we had almost laughed about it. We were relieved to be back together. We had met when we were so young, we had no experience – that was what we said to erase the whole business. We laughed at the kids we had once been. We had lost our innocence.

  But the little flame was still there. Impossible to extinguish. To some my faith in our relationship will look like weakness now that we know how the story ends. But the more I think about it, the more I try to piece it all together, the more certain I become that he could have taken more partners, had more experiences, sated his sexual appetite elsewhere. He could have left me for good, but deep down that was impossible for him. Our meeting had signalled the end of the nightmare, as he once wrote. It was the key to his existence. What mattered was that he possessed me.

  Nine

  By the time Christmas arrived our family had disintegrated. We didn’t spend Christmas Eve together. The horror was etched deep in each of us. I spent the evening at Florian’s house, with him, his partner, Aurore, who was pregnant with their third child, and their two daughters, Ella and Anna. We had champagne and foie gras and tried to pretend everything was normal. It’s strange to think that we managed it somehow – we got dressed up and clinked glasses while we were devastated inside. I couldn’t stop thinking of all those who were absent.

  Earlier in the evening there had been a discreet knock at the door. It was my grandson Maxime, and behind him, Caroline. He rushed towards me holding out a gift. I unwrapped it and found a lovely necklace with a blue stone, chosen by his mother. She was expressing her generosity to me through her son. I was touched. But she stayed outside on the doorstep and refused to come in. She was furious with her brother for having put me up, for having made it possible for me to leave her house, and she was furious with me for not staying. I could hear the anger in her voice as she spoke to Florian outside. I stayed back.

  Knowing that she was standing outside reminded me of other sad Christmases. The one we celebrated in an empty living room in Gournay-sur-Marne after all our furniture had been repossessed. David was fifteen, Caroline eleven, and Florian four. We ate dinner on the garden furniture that the bailiffs had left behind. As if to ward off bad luck, Dominique gave me a ring. I didn’t want it. It wasn’t the right time for such an extravagant gift, especially after I had been so careful not to spend too much on the children. I stood up from the table, went into the kitchen and burst into tears. Caroline came after me and shouted at me for hurting her father’s feelings. She’d felt the same need as I’d always had to protect him.

  Her current distress was no doubt a reflection of how close they had been when she was little. I wanted to help her now, but I didn’t know what to do or how to reach her in those moments. I was feeling extremely fragile myself, even if I did my best not to show it. I embraced silence; she demanded noise. I clung to the presence of my grandson beside me. His birth had brought Caroline and me closer; I remember how much she’d wanted to have a child, how long she’d had to wait, and then the surprise she put on my plate during a family lunch. ‘Look under the napkin!’ she urged me. I was thrilled and deeply moved to find the blurry image of an ultrasound. Eventually, to our great joy, Maxime was born.

  And here he was now, standing before me, upset by the abrupt dissolution of all our family rituals, prisoner of a conflict of loyalty between his mother, waiting for him outside, and his grandmother, who had looked after him so often, with whom he had spent so much time. I knew his habits, his tastes, his form teacher, his friends, his schoolbooks, and now all of a sudden we were only allowed a few minutes together on Christmas Eve. But he didn’t let his feelings show. I wished I could have given him a present, but I wasn’t expecting to see him, and in any case I hadn’t had the energy to do any Christmas shopping. I simply transferred some money to my three children’s bank accounts so they could buy gifts for my grandchildren from me. I gave Maxime a hug so he could go back to his mother, and they left. The following day, I called David and invited myself over. It was Christmas Day and it had always been at his and Céline’s house that the family came together to celebrate birthdays and holidays. He is so gregarious, he always loved the gatherings and parties we held when he was a child, just as he liked to make people laugh at school. He has a generosity, a need to be surrounded by people. And yet I sensed a certain coolness in his voice.

  ‘Why don’t you drop by for dessert?’ he said.

  He was the one to open the front door. Céline came to say hello. I could hear Caroline and Pierre’s voices coming from the dining room and the children’s from the living room. I went straight into the living room to see my grandchildren. I wanted a little of the joy and sweetness that this special day held for the children. How much did they understand of what was going on?

  Only the eldest, Nathan, had been given something like an explanation. He was fourteen. They told him that his grandfather had raped his grandmother and was in prison. I don’t know what he made of this. Nor what his sisters, Charlize and Clémence, had heard. All they had said to me a few weeks earlier was, ‘What a pity we won’t come to swim in the pool in Mazan any more.’

  ‘There’ll be other holidays,’ I had promised, without knowing where or when.

  That Christmas Day we talked about other things. Maxime was happy to spend a few more hours with me.

  From the doorway, Caroline and Pierre beckoned to him that it was time to leave. They didn’t come in to talk to me, and I didn’t go out to them. We were a broken family now, our raw emotions exposing old rivalries from their childhood. Caroline was angry with me for having chosen to stay with her younger brother. David was angry that it was Florian who had gone down with me when I cleared out the house in Mazan. They both wanted to be there for me, to protect me in their own way. But I felt as if they wanted to take possession of my life. I couldn’t bear that. I didn’t want to be dependent on them. How could I explain to them that I needed time on my own?

  I had been by myself for the last few days. Pascale was on holiday in the Antilles for a fortnight, and had left me the keys to her apartment while she was away. It was on the fifth floor of a modern building near the Porte de Versailles in Paris. It felt good to be staying in a friend’s apartment, a woman who was single, had no children, took care of herself and of her home – exactly the set-up I was heading towards. I was sixty-eight and alone for the first time in my life.

  On New Year’s Eve, as 2021 bade good riddance to 2020, to Doumé and Mino, it also bade farewell to happy times, and to our house in Provence, whose entire contents were now up for sale online. I had no idea what the future held. I navigated the storm with no one to talk to but myself and my dog. And that was exactly what I wanted. Around midnight I received a message from Caroline; she said that she loved me, I meant the world to her, and I mustn’t do anything silly. She had found out that I was alone at Pascale’s and thought I might jump from the fifth floor. But that isn’t me. I am the enemy of death, it has taken too much from me. I told her not to worry, that I loved her too, and wished her a happy New Year. I spent the evening binge-watching all the episodes of The Queen’s Gambit, the hit American series about a rebellious orphan girl who becomes a chess grandmaster. I stayed up until five in the morning, my orphan’s eyes wide open.

  I returned to Florian’s house after Pascale came back from her holiday. But she carried on helping me with everything I had to do. There was something restorative about doing it all with her, whereas with my children it would have been more painful. A role reversal I could not bear. They had their lives, I had mine. Female friendship made this difficult period of my life easier; it was like rediscovering the closeness of young girls sighing and dreaming together, wondering what the future might hold. We were just a few years further along the road, after the delusions of marriage. We laughed at seemingly fateful coincidences: a woman called Madame Toupris – Mrs Takeall – who was dealing with my tax affairs, Madame Pardon who set up the debt management plan in my name. Pascale lent me a bit of money to tide me over. She suggested I apply for social housing, which I did with little enthusiasm – I wasn’t sure I wanted to come back to live in the Paris region. The urban hellscape that surrounded her apartment by the Porte de Versailles, with its tangle of avenues, tunnels and junctions alongside the ring road, made me nostalgic for the Provence countryside. Where should I go? I had no ties. It felt as if all the landscapes I had known throughout my life, from Germany to Provence, were stage sets that vanished as soon as I left. I was inhabiting an old wound. The path ahead was about closing it, healing it. Pascale was surprised one day to hear me say that I hoped I might fall in love again. She couldn’t get over the fact that I hadn’t sworn off men for good. So many women our age were doing precisely that, with a mix of bitterness and relief.

  I had an appointment on January 21st with the court-appointed expert psychologist. He had a slew of questions for me. I told him about my mother’s death, my father the soldier and his absences, my maternal grandmother’s affection and natural authority, my sour stepmother, her daughter, the lack of love, my perfect scores in dictation, how I left school very young, my early sexual experiences with Dominique, his demands, our children. At the end he passed me a blank sheet of paper and asked me to sign it, which I did on the bottom right-hand corner, mechanically. ‘You are a subjugated woman, under your husband’s control,’ he concluded. ‘His little slave girl.’

  But the master does not put his slave girl to sleep in order to have her at his mercy! He commands and watches her suffer. What could he know about me, about us, about our love? Nothing! I had never been Dominique’s slave. And he had not always been my tormentor. That was not the man I had married. I left the consulting room in a rage. There were so many versions of our story now. Those of the children, the police and the expert witnesses. In other people’s eyes, mine was crumbling.

  Yet I still clung to it. I tried to understand. Just to understand. I didn’t deny the crime, even though I didn’t yet have the strength to find out the details or the extent of it. I was willing to answer questions, even the most intimate ones. But I didn’t recognise my life as it was summed up by other people. I had been happy, I was sure of it. I was more than just a victim.

  I went down to Mazan and cleaned the house from top to bottom, hoping to get back the deposit. The landlady was not interested in doing me any favours. Whatever hadn’t sold – the coffee table, the wall-mounted television in our bedroom – was given to charity. Les Restos du Cœur, an organisation that gives meals to people in need, bought Dominique’s car for a token sum. I gave back the keys to the house.

  I returned to the Le Pontet prison with a blouson jacket and a few other things for Dominique. Sylvie came with me. We sat on a bench outside while we waited for visiting hours to begin, watching as other people, mostly women, arrived to see their husbands, brothers or sons. With my bag of winter clothes, I must have seemed like one of them. I looked exactly as you would expect a supportive wife or mother to look. Except that I was also the victim.

  Even Dominique didn’t expect this much from me. The first time I’d been to drop off clothes with Florian, he wrote to Michel, Sylvie’s husband, to thank him. He had imagined some sort of male solidarity. ‘I think it must have been you, Michel, who sent me warm clothes that reminded me of the smell of home. I found a hair from the love of my life that warmed my heart for a brief moment.’

  No, it was me who was still worrying that he might be cold. It was me, the love of his life whom he had raped, whose body he had served up to criminals. Me, whose every single hair bore the trace of his poisons. Sylvie told me about the letter and sent it on to me. Florian and I read it together. We both cried. Dominique sounded as if he were worried about threats of possible attacks within the prison. Inside, sex offenders deserve special punishment.

  In a subsequent letter to some friends from Mazan he talked about a fellow inmate who no longer wanted to share a cell with him once he found out what he had done. Dominique even accused Caroline of talking to the man’s family. I called Caroline and asked her if this was true. She was appalled that I could believe such a thing, and she was right, Dominique was manipulating us. He was using prison rumours to deepen the rifts between us, to rub salt in our open wounds. After betraying and breaking us, Dominique still managed to torment us, and somehow I still believed him.

  The imposing prison door swung open and the visitors filed into the building to see their loved ones. I handed the bag of warm clothes to the guard at reception and we left.

  During this time the case had been transferred from the team at Carpentras to the criminal-investigation unit of the Avignon police, who were painstakingly working to identify and track down one by one each of the men who had come to the house to rape me, breaking the aliases of creeps and perverts on the web, finding their addresses, knocking at their doors. Many had wives and children. Men of all ages and occupations, the kinds of men you come across all the time, were now in custody, most of them insisting they had done nothing wrong. The transcripts of their interrogations had been added to the case file to which our lawyer had access. She read them aloud to me, as she had at our meeting with Caroline and David. I listened, paralysed, to the accounts of what the men had done to me, nothing of which I had any recollection of. The description in words of the videos I refused to watch. ‘Say something! Why don’t you say something?’ Caroline cried. Our lawyer reminded her that everyone deals with things in their own way, and at the end of the meeting she told us that she would no longer see us together. She sometimes called me to tell me about another arrest or to read out the latest confession. She added her own coarse, even crude, comments as if we were old friends, or some kind of commando taking revenge on the filthy bastards who had used me like a blow-up doll. The plain-speaking camaraderie that had marked our relationship from the start was becoming unbearable. I wished she would filter her words, protect me from them, leave me to feel my way forward at my own pace. I still refused to watch the videos. But I was slowly and painfully integrating the knowledge of who my husband really was and what he had done to me.

  ‘Open your eyes, Maman! Look what he did to you!’ the children kept repeating.

  By then, I had been living with Aurore and Florian for a few months. My relationship with Florian was calm. He respected my thought process. Strangely enough, it was this child – born during the most fragile moment in our marriage – who now seemed to understand me best. He had no trouble grasping the facts; he even realised, with some bitterness, that the warning signs had been there all along, though he couldn’t possibly have deciphered them at the time.

  Aurore gave a statement to the police in March 2021. She recalled an incident she had never spoken of before: she once thought she overheard Dominique saying that he wanted to ‘play doctor’ with Nathan. Those words had resonated in her mind, she told the investigators, because at the time she herself was involved in proceedings against her grandfather, who had abused her. But the resonance was so strong that she had feared mixing everything up, misinterpreting what she had heard. She told Florian, and together they decided not to say anything. Confronted now with the gravity of the charges against Dominique, that distant memory resurfaced.

  A month later, Aurore’s statement was read aloud to us by our lawyer in her office. I was with Caroline and David. David asked her to read that passage again – it concerned his son, who would have been three years old at the time.

  In the car afterwards, David was livid. To learn all this so many years later – and through a report rather than from Aurore or his brother. And he was worried. We knew the grandchildren were already suffering. Our initial precautions had quickly fallen away. Our anxiety, our adult words, had spilled over. Even our silences betrayed us. It had been impossible to protect the children. They were caught in the shockwave – the family cataclysm Dominique had unleashed. I often wondered how the children would grow, whether I would know how to reassure them.

  I asked Céline if I could speak to Nathan. She encouraged me to. I went up to his room and told him that if he needed to talk about anything, if he had questions, I was there. He didn’t really know what to say – which was perfectly understandable. It was heartbreaking to impose on him such a collapse of his bearings, a family ordeal at an age when you’re searching for yourself, stepping down that long, knotty passage towards adulthood – and the time of first loves too.

  His answers were the short ones teenagers give: yeah, no, I dunno. It isn’t easy to gather a fifteen-year-old boy into your arms. I kept telling him not to worry, that we would get through this, that I would hold on and that things would be all right for him too, that he could count on me, on all of us. I told him how happy I had been to watch him be born and grow.

  I knew perfectly well that all the sweet moments in life weigh very little against horrors like these once they come to light – that those happy memories might even seem suspect, absurd or false. But they were all I had, for myself and for them. When I reminded David how close he had been to his father, how Dominique had always been there for him, helping him at every stage of his life, it only fed his rage. We were both watching our lives ebb away, each on a different bank. I was upstream; he was downstream.

  In the days that followed, David had a violent argument with Florian about Aurore’s statement. He reproached him for keeping everything to himself for years, without thinking of Nathan – of any of them. Florian was devastated and blamed himself. The bond between my sons was breaking; my family was disintegrating further.