“Here we are!”

  Clémence’s voice made her jump. They were standing in front of her. In the bright daylight, she noticed the creases in their clothes, the fine dandruff on the man’s shoulders. She was invited to come back inside. She was offered another cup of tea. She took it, intrigued by their leisureliness. They didn’t seem in any hurry. What did they want? What were they expecting from her?

  “We’d like to show you something,” announced Clémence.

  A screen materialized on one of the mirrors. Photos of a luminous apartment with a skylight appeared. The C.A.S.A. logo was clearly visible on the bottom left.

  “This is our artist’s studio,” said the man. “Eighty square meters.”

  “Facing northwest and south. Full of light,” added Clémence. “Top floor, the eighth.”

  Why were they showing her these photographs? A floor plan showed up now: a large main room, an open kitchen, a small study, a bedroom, and a bathroom. It all seemed low-key, tasteful, elegant.

  “Preparation will be necessary; it will take half a day,” said the man. “You’ll have to come back. Nothing complicated, no need to worry. All you’ll have to do is answer a series of questions. Security, maintenance, and a personal assistant for the apartment need to be set up. Then you’ll also meet Dr. Dewinter, who’s in charge of the artists of the residence. She runs the C.A.S.A. program.”

  Wild hope surged through her. Had they chosen her? Had she made it? Was she going to be able to get on with her life, away from François? These people were so odd. What sort of game were they playing?

  “I haven’t quite understood why you are mentioning the apartment.”

  “Mrs. Katsef, your candidacy has been accepted. We’re delighted.”

  She wanted to dance around the table. But she held back. Her age, her experience. She gave them a charming smile. She said she was delighted, as well. Could she see the place? She was told she could, and no later than this evening. When could she have the keys? Move in?

  Clémence Dutilleul beamed again.

  “You can move in shortly. But you won’t be needing keys, or a pass.”

  Clarissa looked at her, baffled.

  “Your retina will be your key to enter the lobby on the ground level. And your right index finger will open up the door of your studio. Keys and badges are done. Things of the past. Welcome to C.A.S.A., Mrs. Katsef.”

  NOTEBOOK

  I’m not quite sure when it started. There had been warning signs, but I hadn’t paid attention to them. I guess I hadn’t wanted to see. I began to notice he was often late, or that I couldn’t get hold of him during the day. Most of the times, his phone was switched off, and I began to find that strange.

  We had been through this before. Moments of pain I did not want to go back to. That dreadful instant when the suspicion takes over. When you can think of nothing else.

  We had been through what many couples go through. Those bitter, painful, intimate moments where infidelity rears its head. It happens. And it had already happened quite a bit to us. He had always said the other women were not important. I had always managed to forgive.

  Why had I been so lenient? I wonder now. With years comes a new kind of power. The idea that you don’t want anyone taking advantage of you anymore. The inner conviction that you have had enough.

  It doesn’t happen overnight. It builds up slowly, like a thick liquid taking ages to boil. It took a while, for me.

  There had been a truce. And it had lasted for years. He had been ill for quite a stretch. I suppose any thought of an affair had not gone through his head, nor mine. We were too busy tending to him, making sure he would pull through. His medication exhausted him. He slept most of the time.

  I helped him get better, stayed by his side, listened to him. I got on with my life, wrote my books, wrote my TV shows, saw my daughter, my granddaughter, my friends.

  He regained his strength and the illness became a bad memory. He got back to work, spent time with his team, and traveled. Sometimes he left for a day or two.

  I’m trying to think back to what made me understand something was going on. The exact minute when I came out of the fog. The second I knew he was seeing another woman.

  He had been late. He usually was, so I hadn’t paid attention. We were having dinner at the home of some friends, and he turned up with a bouquet of flowers, mumbling some excuse.

  It wasn’t till later, when we got home, while he was in the bathroom, that I noticed the hair on his jacket. Long and blond. I remember saying to myself that this was like a scene out of a bad movie. Terribly clichéd. And yet there it was, that long golden hair stretching out like a snake on the sleeve of his jacket.

  I didn’t say anything. Then I reached out for his jacket, put my nose against the collar. I picked it out immediately.

  Another perfume lingering there.

  I sometimes wonder. If I had noticed anything earlier, if I had done something, would that have changed the course of events?

  I don’t think so. Everything was leading up to that moment.

  Me, standing in front of that door, holding the key in my hand.

  The key to Blue Beard’s secret room.

  2

  LAKE

  If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF, March 28, 1941

  Devotees of broken hearts should apply elsewhere.

  ROMAIN GARY, December 2, 1980

  THE CAT HAD been acting strangely for the past week. Clarissa thought perhaps she should bring it up with Jordan. Chablis ate less and less, and seemed to mew for hours. But what truly alarmed her was when he jumped, startled, as if he had seen or heard someone—the oddest thing. And yet, there was no one. No one, apart from herself. Silence ruled, always. Maybe the cat wasn’t used to it yet. Neither was she. There had been a perpetual racket in the flat she’d shared with François. Noisy neighbors, doors banging, people gabbing in the street below, under their windows. She had only ever lived in ground-floor or second-floor apartments before the C.A.S.A. residence. The early-morning glow dazzled her each day when she awoke. She didn’t need to ask Mrs. Dalloway to turn on any more lights. It was like living in the sky, in the clouds.

  She had never anticipated she’d feel this lonely. She missed François. She missed him at unexpected moments. A blues tune on the radio. A whiff of Vétiver. The sweater he’d given her after a weekend in Ireland. Even if all the furniture was new, even if she’d painstakingly erased all traces of her past and all traces of François, her husband was still there. He materialized like a watermark interlaced into every nook of the apartment. She could even make out his sturdy, slightly stubby-legged outline, the one she had cherished for so long. There he was, sprawled on the sofa, poring over his device. There he was, under the shower, lathering up foam. There he was, asking Mrs. Dalloway for a cappuccino. François had never cared about being smaller than she was. He had no hang-ups about his height. On the contrary, he was proud to have her at his arm. Now that she’d left him, should she call her friends? She wondered what he had told those same friends about their breakup. He couldn’t conceivably have given them the truth. He must have spun a story. But which one? And what would she, in turn, say to her friends? She imagined their dismayed faces. Their pity. No, she must keep it bottled up. François would do the same thing. He didn’t have much choice.

  No matter how hard she tried not to, she imagined him walking up the rue Dancourt. Opening the gate, striding along the passageway, entering the building on the left. She could see him going up to the sixth floor in the tiny run-down elevator. His key in the old ramshackle lock. She didn’t want to see what happened next. But the images swung back at her. It was impossible to make them disappear. She had to give in to them, huddled up, holding her breath. They finally left, like a storm moving on. How could she put an end to her loneliness? She had no idea. She didn’t feel like knocking at the doors of the other artists in the residence, introducing herself. She wasn’t up to it. She remembered that young student who had written to her. Mia White. She hadn’t answered her yet. Was meeting her a good idea?

  Clarissa’s flat still seemed empty, incomplete. Jordan and Andy had found it beautiful. “Slightly inhospitable, don’t you think?” Jordan had said cautiously. “Not quite ‘you.’” Her daughter had gazed at her keenly, with a speck of concern. She had asked her several times if all was well. Jordan was always worrying about her mother. Clarissa had said yes, of course, everything was fine. Yes, she slept badly. That was just settling into a new home. No, she hadn’t yet gotten to know the other tenants of the residence. Just a few of them in the lobby. She’d changed the subject, asking her daughter about her job. Jordan was a hydrologist, working for a major research center on flood risk management.

  Jordan had always been essential to her. Even more so since the breakup. Clarissa didn’t express this out loud, but she was aware deep down of how much she needed her daughter right now. Jordan had captured the best of both her parents, Cla-rissa felt. Physically, she had inherited her father’s dark hair, his green eyes; she had her mother’s startling height, her powerful yet graceful shoulders. She had Toby’s kindness, his interest in other people. She had Clarissa’s belligerence, her sense of humor. But she was also very much herself: both clever and dreamy, tolerant and yet demanding. You couldn’t fool Jordan. She was shrewd and highly intuitive. Clarissa knew that one day, she’d have to tell her about why she’d left François. It was too early. She couldn’t face it.

  As she prepared a quick lunch in her new kitchen, she listened to Jordan, with the cat perched on her knees, discuss her latest conference. Climate change continued to wreak havoc on meteorological conditions, producing torrential rains, which regularly caused all the rivers of the country to rise. Jordan’s specialty was inundation. She worked closely with meteorologists in order to develop preventive strategies for the most vulnerable regions. As a child, she had always been fascinated by water, especially rivers and lakes. Clarissa admired her daughter’s expertise and enthusiasm. Jordan was a respected figure in her field. She gave talks, lectures, was often seen on television. She spoke eloquently, with a husky voice that added to her charm.

  Clarissa sometimes thought Jordan’s profession stemmed from her own interest in quantifying land and premises. In another life, she had been a property surveyor. It wasn’t water she used to measure, but houses and apartments. From an early age, Clarissa felt she needed to understand the lay of the land. Her dad had given her a luminous world globe for her desk when she was seven, and she’d spent hours watching it rotate under her finger. Later, she’d developed a fascination for maps, papering the walls of her rooms with them. It was cities she’d found captivating as a teenager: how they emerged, how they expanded, how they were destroyed by fires, bombings, how they were rebuilt. She’d pored over ancient photos of London to see what neighborhoods looked like before the Blitz. In her early twenties, she’d walked around with a measuring tape tucked away in her pocket. Houses attracted her—their stories, their evolution. Her mother had been convinced that Clarissa was going to become an architect. But she hadn’t.

  While she paid attention to her daughter, slicing bits of mozzarella cheese that Andy promptly put into her mouth despite her grandmother’s remonstrance, Clarissa could not help thinking of her firstborn, and what he would have looked like today. He would have been forty-six. Tall and dark, she supposed. But that was all she could conjure. She had not thought of her son for so long, had banished the sorrow to the back of her mind. Her newfound fragility had resurrected it, nurturing it back to a throbbing vitality she found impossible to combat.

  When she had started hypnotism, all those years ago, to keep the pain at bay, to not let it destroy her, Elise, her hypnotherapist, had asked her to think of a soothing, restful image. The first thing that had come to mind was a lake. Elise had asked her to describe the lake. Why a lake? She had no idea. She simply knew that the image of the lake soothed her, instilling a prodigious calm into her veins. She had tried to describe the lake to Elise; it was vast, she had the feeling it was deep, and its depth did not worry her. On the contrary, the fact that it reached so amply into the earth, forcing its path into the ground, gave her an unprecedented reassurance. The lake’s surface gleamed silver, its smoothness burrowed by steady wavelets. Clarissa could see herself soaring above the lake like a glider, arms outstretched; she could feel the cool wind nip at her cheeks and slide down her back; then she could also discern herself swimming, diving into the watery green abysses, palms stroked by the strange caress of weeds. It seemed to her the lake absorbed her pain, her sorrow.

  She often dreamed of the lake. In the middle of the night, when she couldn’t sleep, she sometimes asked Mrs. Dalloway to display lake videos on her bedroom ceiling. Half-asleep, she let herself be carried off by eddies, lulled by soft splashing. She didn’t know where the water would take her. A peculiar, lacustrine ballet whirled her away; her skin becoming scaly, fishlike, her fingers merging to form pink fins.

  In the blue opaqueness at the bottom of the lake, hazy shapes emerged, hands reached out toward her, while spools of black hair slowly unraveled like flowers of darkness, both soothing and poisonous. Once, she thought she caught a glimpse of Virginia Woolf’s face—not the face she knew, not the writer’s, no, another one, a face that not many had laid eyes upon; the unbearable, bloated, ashen features of the drowned woman, the one whose body had been found weeks after she disappeared on the banks of the river Ouse. The dream of the lake had become a nightmare. It was impossible to know if the images had been born in her own head, or if they came from Mrs. Dalloway’s projections.

  As she listened to Jordan, Clarissa delicately stroked her granddaughter’s head. Adriana, going on fifteen, applied her makeup carefully and wore lacerated black clothes. Despite the rebellious sulk she was fond of sporting, Andy adored her grandmother. She wanted to come and spend the night here. She had even picked out that little couch in the office where she was going to sleep. She interrupted her mother incessantly in order to obtain a date. Jordan got angry. Well, yes, Andy was going to be able to come! Could she just please let her grandmother settle into her new flat? And could she stop being so insistent? Clarissa felt flattered. She, too, loved the relationship she had crafted with her granddaughter.

  “Doesn’t François live with you anymore, Mums?” Andy asked straightforwardly as Clarissa served them homemade cake for dessert.

  Jordan glared at her. Clarissa had been expecting this from her outspoken granddaughter. She calmly replied that no, François wasn’t going to live here. This was her place. Only for her.

  “And for me!” quipped Andy mischievously.

  “That’s right, sweetie, for you, too.”

  “And what about Granddad? Will he come?”

  Jordan sighed. Why was Adriana asking these dumb questions? Clarissa smiled, to show them she wasn’t ruffled. She reminded Andy that Toby had started over, that he lived in Guéthary, in the Basque country, and that he had a new lady friend.

  “Yeah, and she’s not much fun,” mumbled Andy, helping herself to more cake. “I liked the previous one better. She was less of a pain in the ass.”

  Clarissa and Jordan laughed. Despite everything, Clarissa had kept up a good relationship with her first husband. Even if they had divorced over thirty years ago, Toby remained close. Which got on François’s nerves. Clarissa planned to invite Toby for a drink when he was next in Paris. Without the new lady friend.

  “How are things with your brother, Mums?” asked Jordan as she stroked the cat.

  Clarissa shrugged. What an idiot, seriously! Her brother! Her laugh sounded pinched and dry. Heritage stories often made a mess of things. She’d always thought she had been close to Arthur. He was only two years younger than she. They grew up together, spent their childhood and teenage years in London. He did as he pleased. At sixteen, he dressed as Ziggy Stardust, with full makeup, orange hair, and platform soles, to their unadventurous mother’s dismay. Their dad found it funny.

  “He sounded so cool when he was young!” exclaimed Andy.

  “Indeed. But with time, you see, Arthur turned into a full-of-himself, sad little man.”

  “You bet! And my cousins are no better,” added Jordan.

  Clarissa didn’t have to explain to Jordan and Andy how crushed she had been by Aunt Serena’s recent legacy. She’d thought the old lady had been fond of her, just as fond as Serena had been of Arthur. She had often spent holidays in Serena’s house in Surrey, with Toby and Jordan, when her daughter was a child. Warm, joyful moments. When the will had been read out loud to her, she had been flabbergasted. Serena had left her entire fortune to Arthur’s two daughters, Emily and Harriet. All of it. There hadn’t been a single item for Jordan, not even a trinket, a bracelet, or a small souvenir. Arthur’s daughters were in for a considerable sum. They’d be able to buy a small flat, go on a trip, invest, plan for the future. Clarissa had felt shock at first, and then uncertainty. Was this a mistake? she’d asked. She was told not at all. A slow, powerful rage replaced the incomprehension. She had called her brother. She still trusted him then; she still hoped. He was going to say, What an old bitch. How dare she do that! He was going to say his daughters would split everything with Jordan. But nothing happened that way. She’d had a hard time getting hold of Arthur. And when his puffy face finally showed up on her screen, he had acted cowardly and evasive. He didn’t wish to interfere. Serena had her reasons. They had to respect her decision.