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“Why don’t we wait in the first class lounge so the girls can sit down?” my wife suggested.

“We’re riding hard-seat,” I said. “It’s only eight hours.”

The girls looked aghast. I watched them cast baleful looks their mother’s way, and saw, in their silky, seamless faces, the thick patina so ma…

I knew—and Caroline knew—that since the investigation began, my status had slipped—or risen—from that of her husband and equal to that of a person she indulged. Gratitude and guilt played a part in this. I’d worked my ass off at the office for years while she puttered away in her sculpture studio. …

From the very first scene, he enthralled them. He clasped Lucie in his arms, he left her, he came back, he seemed in despair: he had outbursts of anger, then moments of infinitely sweet elegiac huskiness, and the notes that slipped from his bare throat mingled with sobs and kisses. Emma leaned forw…

She stood there lost in a daze, no longer aware of herself except through the beating of her arteries, which she thought she could hear outside herself like some deafening music filling the countryside. The earth beneath her feet was softer than a wave, and the furrows seemed to her like immense br…

In the end, Léon had sworn not to see Emma again; and he reproached himself for not having kept his word, considering all that this woman might still draw down upon him in the way of trouble and talk, not to mention the jokes his fellow clerks traded around the stove every morning. Besides, he was …