Seven years earlier
“Cheers!”
The three of them clinked their glasses—two champagne flutes and one glass of water—in a celebratory toast. There were sudden giggles, knowing looks, nods, and loving smiles. David and Sylvain sipped their champagne, savoring the prickling of the tiny bubbles. Laetitia put down her glass of water and stroked her boldly swelling belly.
“Not a drop of alcohol since you found out, then?” asked Sylvain.
“Not a single drop!” Laetitia said proudly.
“My wife is a saint,” David lovingly teased her. “You can’t imagine what she’s putting herself through to give our son the best start in life. Zero alcohol, zero salt, zero fat, low sugar, steamed vegetables, fruit all day long, fish instead of red meat, yoga, swimming, classical music, early nights . . .”
He sighed. “The past six months have been so boring!”
“I’m not a saint, I’m pregnant, dummy!” Laetitia playfully smacked her husband on the thigh.
“And she keeps going on about parenting rules . . . poor kid! This mom will run a tight ship, let me tell you.”
“You guys are already talking about parenting rules?” Sylvain looked surprised.
“Of course!” Laetitia said, suddenly serious. “Best time to do it is right now. When you’re facing the problem, it’s already too late.”
“What sort of things are you discussing, then?”
“All sorts. Back each other up, don’t undermine each other when the kid is listening, no sweets before they turn three, no Coke before they’re six, no Nintendo before they’re ten . . .”
Sylvain whistled, impressed. “We’ll tell him that if you guys are too strict, he can always come over to us!”
David glanced at his watch.
“We should have waited for Tiphaine before raising a toast,” he said. “She’ll be annoyed she missed it.”
“Not a problem. First off, she hates champagne, and anyway, she didn’t want to stress herself out and keep us waiting. She’s . . . kind of tired these days.”
“Well, what’s the champagne for, then?” Laetitia asked. “A nice bottle of wine would have been fine, you know.”
The question caught Sylvain unprepared. Casting around for a plausible reason, he sputtered, “Well, because, you know . . .”
“I don’t know,” Laetitia said, laughing at his obvious discomfort. But then she realized there was only one reason to open a bottle of champagne: good news. She studied Sylvain for a moment, sure he was hiding a secret, eager to tease it out of him. Then the lightbulb went off.
“She’s pregnant!” she cried, bolting up straight in her armchair.
“H-huh?” stammered Sylvain, looking even more ill at ease.
“Are you two expecting too?” David asked, beaming in delight.
“No!” exclaimed Sylvain. “Well . . . I mean . . .”
The doorbell rang, saving him from their inevitable questions. Laetitia leaped to her feet and waddled to the hallway as fast as she could. “Congratulations!” she called out, vanishing down the corridor.
“Please don’t say anything!” Sylvain begged. “She made me swear I would wait!”
He turned to David, a look of comical dismay on his face. “She is going to kill me!”
David burst out laughing and got up to kiss his friend on both cheeks.
“Welcome to the club! How far along is she?”
“Three months.”
Laetitia opened the front door, her whole face lit up with happiness.
“Darling!” she cried, her voice filled with laughter. “Our children will grow up together! Isn’t it wonderful!”
Without waiting for Tiphaine’s response, she pulled her in for a long hug.
Later, when they looked back on that evening, the first thing David recalled was the perfection of each moment—the incredible joy in each glance, each gesture, each word. Their future plans, their promises and laughter, and the feeling of coming home to a family—one he had chosen for himself rather than been dumped into—gave him the sense of connection he had so longed for as a child cut off from his roots. An unwanted orphan, passed from foster families to children’s homes, he had climbed a steep, rocky path to adulthood, walking the delicate tightrope between good and evil, nearly falling off a hundred times and clinging on a hundred times more. Until he fell off for good. Prison. And then a chance for a do-over.
Back to square one.
His own square one was right here. Laetitia. And the tiny frog-like creature in her belly. His very own little munchkin. The son he would give everything he had missed out on, whose hand he would hold to keep him on the best path. He always said “best path,” not “right path,” because as far as he could see, the “right path” didn’t exist: it was a trap, a mirage, a lie told to children to keep them on the straight and narrow. Keep your head down. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Just keep walking, head down. Don’t glance sideways.
What a joke!
Real life isn’t about straight lines. Life is one vast expanse of rugged terrain, riddled with obstacles, twists and turns, and deviations. A maze full of pitfalls with no straight lines in sight. The shortest path between two points is the one you know best.
But whatever you do, whatever milestones you pass on the way, at the end of the road you’ll always end up in the same place.
That’s what David thought. Before he met Laetitia.
He had done what everybody does. He took the only path open to him—a rope bridge across a chasm, without a map or a handrail. Without the two guides who should have been there to shepherd him patiently and lovingly into adulthood.
So he fell.
He started out with petty crime. Pot at thirteen, coke at fifteen, barely into puberty and already chasing cash—small-time dealing, the wrong crowd. He was caught up in the machine. Petty crime turned into burglary, breaking and entering, aggravated assault.
Two years in juvie.
Once he was out, he attempted for the first time to climb back onto the bridge. To keep moving forward. David clung to what help he could, but not much was there—just a few strands of rotten rope that snapped under his fingers and broken boards that crumbled away beneath his feet. It was a slippery slope, and he fell back down. Four more years inside, with the men this time, for armed robbery.
On his second release from prison, he made himself a promise. He would never go back. He pulled himself back up onto the bridge. He kept going, whatever the cost. At first, he crawled on hands and knees, washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant to pay for a single attic room. Three hundred euros a month, no hot water or heat, a shared bathroom on the landing, cockroaches scuttling across the walls. Then he shuffled on his knees, driving a bus to pay for a slightly larger room with hot water and heat—still no toilets, but at least no more cockroaches. And then gradually, he managed to stand, carefully testing his balance at every step, one foot in front of the other, taking it slowly. It took him several years.
By twenty-seven, he was a hospital janitor and able to rent a studio apartment with its own bathroom.
That’s where he met Laetitia. At the hospital, that is, not in his studio or bathroom.
Her own journey had been a smooth, wide, fast road with no cracks or potholes, which wound through a lush green rural landscape: a scattering of fruit trees, a few low hills, and fields and meadows as far as the eye could see. A clear, distant horizon. Until her own two guides were knocked down by a truck.
It happened one night, as Sunday turned into Monday. And one wrong turn was all it took. Her parents were on their way home from an evening with friends, not too late, barely midnight. A smooth, wide, fast road. It was raining, though that hardly mattered. The story itself hardly mattered; it was just another accident. Wrong place, wrong time. Killed by what Laetitia later always called the three TRs: a truck, traumatic injury, and tragedy.
Her mother was killed on the spot. The car flipped, and she was thrown out and landed in the neighboring field, where she died. Her father lingered on for a week, hovering between life and death. Laetitia barely left his bedside, snatching a few hours here and there to sneak home and sleep, shower, change clothes.
And to meet David.
It was love at first sight. She was sitting in the corridor while her father was in the operating room, and though her face was etched with grief, her eyes red with weeping, and her nose raw from being dabbed with tissues, David could not help but find her touching and ravishingly beautiful. He felt an irrepressible urge to reach out and help her through the ordeal, and maybe, to walk with her a little way on her bereavement journey.
The following months were a strange experience for Laetitia. The fathomless pain of losing her parents waged a merciless battle with the giddy joy of falling deeply in love. She was an only child: the sole family she had left were a distant uncle and two cousins she had not seen since childhood. She grasped the hand David held out to her like a life raft in the middle of the ocean. At first, she did not know where it would lead, and she felt corrosive guilt about wanting the man she met at her dying father’s bedside, daydreaming about him rather than mourning her parents. She’d catch herself smiling, fantasizing . . . and yet also blaming him for being there, as if he had come to turn her away from her grief. Hating him for something that was so good for her.
A one-way street. Deviations and detours. It took them some time to find their footing and move forward—or at least try—together.
Eighteen months later, they moved into Laetitia’s parents’ house, her childhood home. She could not face the idea of selling it or renting it out. She could not picture strangers taking ownership of the walls that held so many of her memories and her family story. And now that she, like David, had no family, they decided to build a new one of their very own.
David had absolute faith in this new start. A second chance. They were on the best path, no question. Together they would conquer mountains, hand in hand. It would be a wonderful journey. For the first time in forever, David felt serene about the future. But he was forgetting one detail.
Whatever you do, whatever milestones you pass on the way, at the end of the road you’ll always end up in the same place.
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