In the StoryThe Child in the Videos
The tape is from 1992. The little girl it shows has no name. Maud Renaud thought she was watching family footage. A hallway, familiar voices, moments preserved almost by chance. Then a child crosses the frame. No relative can explain her presence. And the more Maud asks, the more uncertainty begins to look like a secret.
Open the novel ↗A moment in the opening pages
Since Alain’s death two years earlier, Claire had kept his gardening jacket behind the door and his cracked mug in the dish rack, as though absence could be contained by a handful of objects left in the wrong places. Moving was the first decision she had made without asking the children to approve it. Maud knew that. She also knew that the way she photographed the rooms sometimes suggested the opposite: that no decision was complete until she had preserved a record of it.Read the excerpt ↗