Marc’s desk had always had a drawer that stuck.
Vincent had known before he could read. You had to pull it straight out three centimeters, lift it almost imperceptibly, then continue. His father did it without thinking, the way you step around a stair in the house where you grew up. As a child, Vincent had taken the defect for one of the furniture’s rules. Later, when he understood that a carpenter could have fixed it in an hour, he had thought it very like Marc to prefer knowing the precise resistance to removing it.
Six weeks after the funeral, the drawer remained just as obstinate.
“Leave it,” Agnès said.
Vincent did not answer. He had already placed his phone on the oak top, camera open, and shifted the desk lamp ten centimeters so its shadow would not fall across the contents. Around them, Marc’s old office at the Lhomond Center looked less like a shrine than a room whose move had been interrupted. Two gray crates bore white labels: PERSONAL EFFECTS and TO BE DECIDED. A paler rectangle marked where a bookcase had been dismantled. The air smelled of warm radiator dust and new cardboard.
Agnès kept her coat on. She had not yet agreed to put down her bag.
“You photographed the pens,” she continued.
“One belongs to the Center.”
“Of course.”
“It’s engraved.”
“Vincent, this isn’t a burglary.”
He looked up. His mother still had the gift of making a short sentence a complete objection. She had aged since Marc’s death, but not in the spectacular way condolences seemed to expect. Nothing had collapsed. She merely forgot to button her coat, let her coffee go cold, searched for glasses already in her hand. Tiny deviations. Vincent had noted them before reproaching himself for noting them.
“Exactly,” he said. “Afterward no one will remember where anything came from.”
“A very serious matter for the pens.”
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