By 7:22, Nora Veyrac had already moved the key to safe number 12 three times.
First onto the sideboard with her apartment keys. Then into her bag’s inside pocket, from which she almost immediately removed it because she hated the idea that a zipper could open without her noticing. Finally she slipped the small flat key into a kraft envelope with the Banque du Passage access card and wrote in black marker: **SAFE 12 — ORIGINAL DEED — 18/10**.
The eighteenth was tomorrow. There was nothing strange about the date. It merely prevented an essential document from vanishing at the bottom of a bag among tickets, receipts, and things you were certain to remember until you needed to find them.
“You can stop checking the time,” Camille said from the kitchen. “It won’t toast the bread any faster.”
Nora looked up. Her sister held a slice of bread over the sink, a knife in her other hand. Mina, in purple pajamas, had built a cereal dam around her bowl and was trying to stand a spoon inside it.
“I have to be at La Défense at eight forty-five.”
“Then don’t come to people’s houses for breakfast at seven twenty.”
“You asked me for the title deed.”
“I asked you to collect it. Not supervise my butter.”
Camille was smiling, but barely. Since June, almost all their conversations had had that texture: a joke on the surface, something much less light beneath. Selling their father’s old workshop had forced the sisters to talk more than they would have chosen. The money was meant to let Camille pay off part of the mortgage on her new apartment. Nora simply wanted no one to discover, six months later, a forgotten easement, an unpaid tax, a forged signature, or one of the little things everyone called “a detail” until the day it cost thirty thousand euros.
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