Pauline had asked them not to throw anything away before she arrived. At the Tilleuls clinic, the instruction had produced what it produced everywhere: an overstuffed gray folder, three unrelated sheets, and, in a clear sleeve, a crumpled bus ticket between a two-euro coin and a bakery receipt.
“Collecting trash now?” Juliette Marin asked.
Pauline did not look up. She traced the chronology written by the admitting nurse with her finger. 8:17, emergency call from a bus shelter. 8:29, team arrival. 8:52, admission. At 9:06, Samuel Varenne had given his name, date of birth, and sister’s number without hesitation. The reason field read: brief disorientation, faintness without confirmed loss of consciousness.
“Only trash with a time printed on it.”
Juliette slid the sleeve to the edge of the cart.
“Nine twelve. The ticket doesn’t prove he was on the bus.”
“No.”
“It proves he bought a ticket.”
“That’s why I already like it.”
Juliette gave the brief smile of someone who knew Pauline well enough to hear the joke and not well enough to know whether it was entirely a joke.
The short-stay observation unit occupied an L-shaped corridor between neurology and liaison psychiatry. You heard doors before you saw people: the damped breath of closers, the sharp impact of a badly adjusted door, cart wheels changing sound over a repaired strip of linoleum. Nothing stayed long there, in principle. Patients included.
Samuel Varenne had been there less than an hour when Pauline entered his room. He was thirty-eight, with a pale bruise on his right cheekbone and the irritated look of a man persuaded to lie down without being persuaded he was ill. His shoes were lined up beneath the chair. On the tray table, his phone vibrated regularly, screen against the plastic.
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