The gate no longer closed. Mathieu pushed open the iron panel, which scraped across the gravel with a throat-clearing groan, and stood there, suitcase in hand, in front of his father's house.
It hadn't changed. That was worse.
The red bricks, the slate roof, the gray shutters with paint peeling off in patches—everything was exactly as he remembered, except the memory was fifteen years old and the house had aged thirty. Ivy had eaten half the eastern facade. His mother's rosebushes—his ex-mother's, the woman who had left this house and this man in the same motion—were nothing but dry stalks clinging to a twisted trellis.
Mathieu set down his suitcase. He took out the key the notary had sent him by registered mail, in a kraft envelope, with a yellow Post-it that read “My condolences” in careful handwriting. He had kept the Post-it. He didn't know why.
The lock resisted, then gave way all at once, and the smell caught him by the throat. Cold tobacco. Damp stone. Something sweeter underneath, which he couldn't name—maybe just the smell of a house where someone had lived alone for a long time.
He crossed the hallway without turning on the lights. The kitchen was at the end, enormous, with its cracked tile floor and oak table that weighed as much as a car. His father used to drink his coffee there in the morning, in front of the window overlooking the garden.
The garden, and the pond.
Mathieu didn't look out the window. He set his keys on the table, turned on the faucet—the water ran rusty, then clear—and drank a glass standing up, staring at the wall.
He had sent the message three weeks earlier. A group text, the first time he'd written to some of them in years. It had taken him a long time to phrase it. Too casual, and it sounded fake. Too solemn, and no one would come. In the end, he had written: “My father died. I inherited the house in Picardy. It needs to be cleared out. How about coming out for a bit? We could use it as a chance to see each other again.” The “we could use it as a chance” had cost him half an hour.
Everyone had said yes. Not right away—there had been delays, “Let me check my schedule,” and “When was it again?”—but everyone had said yes. Even Hugo, who hadn't added a single word after his “okay.”
Nora arrived first. Mathieu heard a car door slam, then a voice saying, “Fuck, this is the middle of nowhere,” with genuine delight, and she appeared in the kitchen doorway, tanned, her hair shorter than he remembered, a gym bag over one shoulder and a six-pack in each hand.
“You look awful,” she said by way of greeting.
She hugged him. Hard. For too long. When she let go, her eyes were shining, but she was smiling, and she set the beer on the table as if that gesture alone were enough to erase ten years.
“This place is creepy,” she said, looking around. “I love it.”
Camille arrived twenty minutes later, in a taxi from Amiens station. She wore a linen dress and sunglasses that had cost more than the oak table. She kissed Mathieu on both cheeks, kissed Nora, said, “The countryside is beautiful,” in a tone that convinced no one, and asked where her room was.
Hugo didn't bother to ring the bell. He came in through the back door, the one facing the garden, like someone who knew the house. He wore jeans and a polo shirt, and he had a set of keys in his hand—the duplicates Guy had given him, probably.
“Hey,” he said to Mathieu.
Nothing else. No hugs. He shook Nora's hand, nodded at Camille, and sat down at the kitchen table as if he'd never left it.
“The upstairs bathroom faucet is leaking,” he said. “Since March.”
Mathieu didn't ask how he knew.
Antoine and Léa arrived almost at the same time, by chance—Antoine in a rental sedan too large for the hamlet's roads, Léa in a tired Clio whose exhaust coughed. They crossed paths on the gravel, and for a moment—a half second, maybe less—they looked at each other like two people calculating the exact distance between a kiss on the cheek and a handshake. They opted for the kiss. Two. Quick. Left cheek, right cheek.
Mathieu watched them from the kitchen window. Léa wore jeans and a sweater too large for the season. Her hair was tied back, a backpack on her shoulders, and there was something in the way she walked—a hesitation with every step, as if the gravel reminded her of something.
He opened the door.
“Hey,” Léa said.
She smiled. A real smile, a little sad, a little relieved, and Mathieu felt that familiar, useless thing in his chest that he'd spent ten years trying to forget.
“Hey,” he said.
Antoine came in behind her, loud, arms spread wide.
“This is gorgeous! This is the real France! We're having a barbecue, right? Is there a barbecue? Guy had a barbecue, I remember.”
No one pointed out that he called Mathieu's father by his first name, as if they'd been close. They hadn't.
All six of them gathered in the kitchen around the oak table, with Nora's beer and a saucisson Hugo had brought without telling anyone. Nora talked loudly. Antoine talked louder. Camille smiled politely. Hugo sliced the saucisson into even pieces with a knife he'd found in the drawer without looking.
Léa sat across from Mathieu. She didn't say much. She looked at the kitchen, the walls, the ceiling, like someone searching for differences in a spot-the-seven-differences puzzle.
“The postal calendar is missing,” she said suddenly.
Everyone fell silent. Because it was true—there had always been a postal calendar hanging near the fridge, with pictures of kittens or Alpine landscapes, and now it was gone. And because the fact that Léa remembered it meant she remembered this kitchen, that summer, this house, and therefore she remembered the rest, too.
“My father must have stopped renewing it,” Mathieu said.
The silence lasted three seconds. Then Nora opened a beer and said:
“So where are we sleeping? Because fair warning, I snore.”
And everyone laughed, because it was easier than not laughing.
Mathieu assigned the rooms. He took his father's room on the ground floor because no one else wanted it. Camille and Nora shared the large bedroom upstairs. Léa took the small room at the back, the one overlooking the garden. The pond. Hugo took the one next door without comment. Antoine got the last one, under the eaves, with a dormer window and a mattress that smelled of mothballs.
“Charming,” Antoine said from the stairs. “Really. Rustic.”
“Shut up,” Nora said.
Night fell quickly. They ate pasta with a sauce Camille improvised, cooking the way she argued a case—with method and without passion. They drank. They talked about their lives carefully, the way you walk across a frozen lake. Camille talked about her firm. Antoine talked about his clients. Nora told a story from the ER that made everyone laugh except Hugo. Léa talked about her students. Hugo didn't say much of anything.
No one talked about Romain.
No one talked about the pond.
At midnight, Mathieu went outside to smoke on the front step. The air was cool, heavy with grass and earth. The stars were absurd—too many, too visible, as if someone had turned up the brightness. At the end of the garden, behind the willows that had grown taller, the pond was there. Black. Still. Waiting.
Mathieu crushed out his cigarette and went back inside.
In the kitchen, Hugo was rinsing the glasses. He didn't look up.
“Did the notary tell you about the land?” he asked.
“What land?”
“The land around the pond. Your father wanted to have it filled in. He'd started the paperwork. Before.”
Hugo turned off the faucet. Wiped his hands on a dish towel.
“Before he died,” he clarified, in case that wasn't clear.
Then he went upstairs to bed, and Mathieu remained alone in his father's kitchen, with the sound of the leaking faucet upstairs and the silence of the pond outside.