For the last time. The limousine comes to a halt across the pavement, the door slams and, instead of going to open Gabrielle’s, Jean-Charles becomes absorbed in a bed of begonias, a pallid spot on the already yellow lawns on rue des Bouleaux where a single eponymous birch tree is growing, sickly. Gabrielle joins him just as he turns away, she sees the little calico cat whose brains are spreading onto the white begonias, its forehead split down the middle and its life departing through an orange smudge, its black-and-grey flecked belly stops twitching, the eyes are already closed. Gabrielle grazes the sweating muzzle — she who detests being kissed by a cat — but she has to put off her caress till later. And so all is well, despite the incident. Jean-Charles is dropping her off one last time at 10,005 rue des Bouleaux; it was a mistake for her to sit in the front, but the backseat was jammed with the thousand items left over when an office is cleared out — the papers, the photos under glass, the collection of prints by Charlène Lemire that she’d been one of the first to admire and that now, in her home, would finally be given the softer light necessary for their silken ghosts.
