Chapter 29: The Letter

Margaux read the letter at the breakfast table, with Julien pretending to read the paper.

It was one page.

Thibault asked to meet her once, in a public place, for ten minutes.

He asked for nothing else, and he wrote that she would be right to burn the page.

She turned it over.

On the back he had written a time and a place: Saturday, noon, the café on the corner of the Place Bellecour.

"No," said Julien.

"I haven't said anything."

"You are going to say yes."

She folded the page in four.

"He has a court date," she said. "I want it over. I will not spend the first year of her life waiting for a man to turn up at a gate."

"Then I come."

"You sit in the car."

"Margaux."

"Julien. I walked through that clinic alone. Let me walk through this one."

He put down the paper.

"Lise will be at the next table," he said. "With the pram. And my guard will be at the pillar, in a hat."

"In a hat?"

"I have been told it is inconspicuous."

She laughed in spite of herself and leaned across to kiss him.

The Place Bellecour on a Saturday was a wide pale square of pigeons and prams.

Lise sat at the next table in her puffer jacket, with a sleeping baby and a hot chocolate, glaring at the room.

A man in a flat cap stood beside a pillar and tried to look like a tree.

Thibault was already at the corner table.

He wore an old overcoat, and he had lost so much weight that the collar stood away from his neck.

He rose when she came.

"Thank you for coming."

"Ten minutes," Margaux said, and sat.

He did not order anything, and neither did she.

"I'll be quick," he said. "My mother's trial is in March. Her lawyer says four years."

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