In the StoryThe Children of the Lake
There are four of them in the photograph. They all remember a fifth. Sorting through old summer-camp slides, Maud Lenoir rediscovers the summer of 1996: the windbreakers, the games, the lake. And an absence that makes no sense. She is not the only one who remembers this child. Other adults carry the same missing piece, with details they thought belonged only to them.
Open the novel ↗A moment in the opening pages
Nora noted the time: 9:11. She had limited the visit to four people. Claire was working. Samir was on a construction site in Dijon and had declined, by message, to “take part remotely in navigating by memory.” Léo did not need to be there; he would receive the unedited photographs when they returned. Maud and Thomas had been admitted as people concerned with the collection’s provenance, not as guides to the terrain.Read the excerpt ↗