Antoine slowed the car.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s just, you know, to celebrate your birthday. We did your sixth birthday there, remember?”

“No,” she said slowly. “I don’t remember a thing about Noirmoutier.”

She must have realized that she was acting like a spoiled child, because she swiftly put a hand on her brother’s arm.

“Oh, but it doesn’t matter, Tonio. I’m happy. I am, really. And the weather is beautiful. It’s so nice to be alone with you and to get away from everything!”

By “everything,” Antoine knew she meant Olivier and the wreckage their breakup had left behind. And her fiercely competitive job as a publisher at one of France ’s most famous publishing companies.

“I booked us into the Hotel Saint-Pierre. You remember that, don’t you?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “Yes, I do! The old, lovely hotel in the woods! With Grand-père and Grand-mère… Oh, God, so long ago…”

The Beatles sang on. Mélanie hummed along. Antoine felt relieved, at peace. She liked his surprise. She was happy to go back. But one little thing niggled at him. One little thing he hadn’t taken into account when the idea of going back had occurred to him.

Noirmoutier 1973 had been their last summer with Clarisse.

Why Noirmoutier? he wondered as the car sped on and Mélanie hummed to “Let It Be.” He had never considered himself a nostalgic person. He had never looked back. But since his divorce he had changed. Relentlessly he had found himself thinking more about the past than the present or the future. The weight of the past year, his first year alone, that dreary, solitary year, had sparked off pangs of regret, longing for his childhood, striving for happy memories. That was how the island had come back to him, timidly at first, then more powerfully and more precisely as the memories came tumbling in like mail gathering in a box.