I MUST HAVE SCRAPED MY CHEEK. It burns. My jaw hurts. I knocked a vase over when I fell, I remember hearing it shatter on the floor and I'm wondering if I got cut with a piece of glass. I don't know. The sun is still shining outside. The weather's good. Little by little, I catch my breath. I feel an awful migraine coming on, any minute.

Two days ago, as I was watering my garden, an unsettling message appeared to me when I looked up to the sky. A cloud, with an unmistakably distinct shape. I looked around, wondering if it were intended for someone else, but I didn't see anyone. And there was no sound either, just me watering. Not a word, not a scream, not a whisper of air, not a single motor — and God knows there is no shortage of mowers and blowers around here.

Generally, I can feel it when the outside world cuts in. I've been known to stay holed up for several days in a row, never setting foot outdoors, if I perceive some unsettling omen in the erratic flight of a bird — coupled with a shrill cry or some sinister croaking — or if some weird ray of sunlight makes its way through the branches and hits me right in the face, or if I lean over to give a few coins to a man sitting on the sidewalk and he suddenly grabs my arm and shouts in my face, "The demons! The demons with their demon faces! I threaten to kill them and then they obey!" The man belched, kept repeating this same sentence over and over with crazy eyes, never letting me go, and when I got home that night I canceled my train ticket, immediately forgetting all about the reason for my trip, finding it suddenly and completely unimportant. You see, I'm neither suicidal nor deaf to the warnings, messages, and signs that I receive.

When I was sixteen, I missed a plane after a night of drinking at the Bayonne Festival and the plane crashed. I thought about this for a long time. Then and there, I decided I would take certain precautions to protect my life. I accepted the fact that these things exist and anyone who chose to laugh it off, well, I just let them laugh. I'm not sure why, but I've always felt that the signs in the sky are the most telling ones, the most urgent. An X-shaped cloud — rare enough that it gets my full attention — would normally put me on high alert, every time. I don't know what happened. How could I have dropped my guard? Of course it's a little (or a lot?) to do with Marty. I'm so ashamed. I'm so furious now. Furious at myself. There's a chain on my door. There's a goddamn chain on my door. Did I just forget? I stand up and go put it on. I briefly pinch my lower lip between my teeth, I hold still for a full minute. Apart from the broken vase, I can't see any mess. I go upstairs to change. Vincent is coming for dinner with his girlfriend, and nothing is ready.

The young woman is pregnant, but it isn't Vincent's child. I have stopped talking about that. I have nothing to gain. I don't have the strength to fight him anymore. Or the will. Once I figured out how much he takes after his father, I thought I would lose my mind. Her name is Josie. She's looking for an apartment for Vincent and herself, and for the baby on the way. Richard pretended to be sick when he heard the price of Paris rentals. He paced up and down muttering to himself. He's made a habit of that now. I can see how much older he's grown, just how somber these twenty years have made him. "You mean monthly or yearly?" he asked, putting on that mean look of his. He wasn't sure he could swing it. As for me, I'm supposed to have a regular and generous income.

Naturally.

"You wanted a son," I tell him. "Remember?"

I left him because he became unbearable, and now he's more unbearable than ever. I tell him he should take up smoking again, or jogging. Anything to get rid of that bitterness which drives him most of the time.

"Excuse me, but go fuck yourself," he tells me. "Anyway, I'm broke right now. I thought he got a job?"

"I don't know, talk it over with him."

I don't have the will to fight him either. I spent more than twenty years of my life with this man, but sometimes I wonder how I ever found the strength.

I run a bath. My cheek is red and maybe a little yellow as well, like pottery, and there's a tiny drop of blood at the corner of my lip. My hair is truly a mess. The clip I was wearing let a lot of it loose. I pour some bath salts into the tub. This is madness because it's already five o'clock and the girl, Josie ... I don't know her very well. I don't know what to think of her.

Yet there is an incredibly warm and beautiful light, so removed from the slightest whisper of a threat. It's so hard for me to believe that something like this could happen to me under a sky so blue, on such a gorgeous day. The bathroom is awash with sunlight. I can hear cries in the distance, far-off children playing. A dusting of clouds on the horizon. Birds, squirrels, and so on.

It feels so good. This bath is a miracle. I close my eyes. I can't say I've wiped it all away, but after a moment, I'm completely back to myself. The expected migraine has not come. I order sushi from the place that delivers.

I've known worse with men I freely chose.

After picking up the larger pieces of the vase, I vacuum the spot where I fell. Just to think, only hours before I had been lying there, my heart pounding. It makes me pretty uncomfortable. And right as I'm about to pour myself a drink, I get a message from Irène, my mother, who is seventy- five and whom I haven't seen — or heard from — in a month. She says she had a dream about me, that I was calling her for help. But I didn't call her at all.

Vincent doesn't seem quite convinced by my story. "Your bicycle is in excellent shape," he says. "Isn't that odd?" I stare at him a moment, then I shrug my shoulders. Josie is bright red. Vincent has just grabbed her wrist, hard, and forced her to release the peanuts. Apparently, she's already gained forty pounds.

They don't look right together. Richard, who wouldn't know, told me that kind of girl could be good in bed. What does that mean, to be good in bed? In the meantime, she wants a nine-hundred-square-foot two-bedroom in a certain neighborhood. Nothing that size can be found for less than three thousand euros.

"I filled out an application at McDonald's," Vincent says. "For the meantime."

I encourage him in this endeavor, or something better for his self-esteem — why not? A pregnant woman is expensive to keep.

"You should know ..." I started to say, before he even introduced her to me. "I'm not asking what you think," he answered. "I don't give a shit what you think."

That's how he acts with me since I left his father. Richard is an excellent tragic actor. And Vincent is his best audience. As we're finishing dinner, he looks at me again with suspicious eyes. "What is it with you? What's wrong?" I can't stop thinking about it, of course. Throughout the meal, it was never far away. I'm wondering if I were chosen at random or if I had been followed, if it's someone I know. Their talk of rent and the baby's bedroom doesn't interest me at all, though I admire what they're taking on — what they're attempting — a trick by which their problem becomes my problem. I stare at him for a second, trying to imagine his expression if I told him what happened to me this afternoon. But it is no longer in my repertoire. I no longer have the power to imagine my son's...