On Friday, October 9, the lake had acquired a shore none of them had drawn.
The excavator had eaten away part of the bank, packed down the rest, and laid three rows of gray blocks where the earth had opened the week before. From a distance, the work looked like a neat correction. Up close, you could still see the severed roots, the dried mud on the new stones, and the surveyors’ fluorescent marks.
Maud stayed behind the yellow stake Giraud had just driven into the ground.
“This far,” he said. “No lower.”
“Is that how you welcome people now?” Thomas asked.
“I’m thinking of having it embroidered on the vests.”
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.
No one minded the distinction as long as it remained a sentence on a form.
Maud looked at the water.
No wind. The beeches on the opposite shore continued beneath the surface with an almost obscene precision. Between the two, the real boundary vanished into gray-green, except where a drifting leaf distorted two trunks at once.
She thought of Zoé, who had sent her a photograph before she left: her handball bag open on the couch, with the message, *5:15. This time it’s you.* Maud had answered yes without an exclamation point, as though restraint increased a promise’s value.
Nicolas had only asked:
“And if the lake decides to keep you?”
“The lake doesn’t decide anything.”
He had looked at her long enough for her to hear what he had not said next.
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.