His long, lanky build had grown a potbelly, like his father’s, like his grandfather’s. Going on a diet had been too much of an effort. It was bad enough getting up in the mornings, gearing up to try to keep up with the workload piling up. Bad enough living alone, when he had just spent the last eighteen years married and raising a family. Bad enough trying to convince everyone, most of all himself, that he was happy.

The thought of Mélanie’s eyes on his pale, flabby stomach made him wince.

“I left my bathing suit at the hotel!” he yelled back.

“You dope!”

He went to stand on the wooden pier that reached far into the water. The beach was filling up steadily with families, old people, sulky teenagers. It had not changed. Time had not altered a thing. It made him smile, but it also made tears come to his eyes. He brushed them away angrily.

Boats of all shapes and sizes churned along the choppy sea. He walked to the end of the rickety pier and looked back at the beach and then out to sea. He had forgotten how beautiful the island was. He breathed in great, wolfish gulps of sea air.

He watched his sister come out of the water and shake her hair dry, like a dog. Despite her small size, she had long legs. Like Clarisse. From afar, she seemed much taller than she actually was. She came up to the pier shivering, her sweatshirt tied around her.

“That was fabulous,” she said, putting an arm across his shoulders.

“Do you remember that old gardener at the hotel? Père Benoît?”

“No, I don’t…”

“An old fellow with a white beard. He used to tell us horrible stories about people drowning on the Gois.”

“Oh! Awful breath, right? A mixture of Camembert and cheap red wine. And Gitanes.”

“That’s him.” Antoine chuckled. “He once took me here, to this pier, and he told me all about the Saint Philibert disaster.”

“What happened to poor Saint Phili? Isn’t he the Noirmoutrin monk the church here is named after?”