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done, so by the time the ruffled guy in the suit came in Alain was already in a bad mood.
    The man came over. ‘Hello.’
    Alain looked him up and down. Young guy, unruly black hair, good-looking and confident. It made Alain dislike him even more.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘What will this get me?’ He held out some loose change.
    Alain doubted there was more than forty cents there. He sneered. ‘Get lost.’
    ‘Just a piece of bread? I’m starving.’
    Something about the man bothered him. Smug, sure, but that wasn’t all. He smelt of trouble, and Alain wanted him out. ‘I said, get lost.’ They locked eyes for a moment, but the
man shrugged. He didn’t look pleased, of course, but Alain was happy he’d got the message.
    As the guy turned and took a step towards the door, Alain went behind the counter, turning his back on him as he did so.
    Big mistake.
    Alain felt the glass hit the back of his head. He fell to the floor, and the next thing he felt was the bastard’s fists impacting his face. Two, three times, the guy’s eyes on fire,
lost in his rage.
    ‘Please,’ Alain managed, and his attacker stared, as if realizing what he was doing. There was an instant of shame on his face before he stood and backed off, then made for the door.
Alain got up slow, just catching sight of the guy sauntering off down the road as though nothing had happened.
    He looked over to the woman, who was still sitting, eating. ‘You saw that?’ he said. She shrugged, completely uninterested. He called an ambulance. By the time they came, the woman
had gone.
    The police got there a few minutes after the ambulance, long enough for Alain to work out what had made him so uneasy when the guy who’d attacked him had first come through the door.
    There had been something feral in those eyes. The anger was already there, just waiting for an excuse to explode. Alain had known more than his fair share of people like that in the past. Hell,
the desire to get away from that kind of company was why he’d finally got his act together.
    A guy like that was always bad news. There was no telling what he was capable of.

14
    Léna woke. It had been a long night, and she hadn’t fallen asleep until close to dawn.
    A
long
night.
    Her parents had run upstairs the moment they’d heard the screaming, hers and Camille’s. Her mum had held Camille and offered her hand out to Léna, and all of them had cried
and cried, until Léna had insisted on explanations. Camille had woken in the mountain, she was told. Camille had walked home. Camille was back, and prayers had been answered.
    Léna listened, and found herself growing colder with every word, colder and more frightened.
    Camille’s distressed eyes were trained on her the whole time. ‘What happened to Léna?’ Camille asked, and it took Léna a moment to realize she was talking about
how old she looked.
She doesn’t know
, Léna thought.
She thinks it’s still four years ago. She doesn’t know what happened to the coach.
    Léna could see it in her father’s face too, and in her mother’s. The news had to be broken to her. They went to her mum’s room, to a drawer where all the photo albums
were kept. Alongside them was another book of memories – morbid, Léna had always thought, to keep what amounted to a scrapbook of the accident, of the memorial service, but her
mother’s mental state had hardly been
even
, at the time. Or since.
    She watched Camille hear how most of their friends had died; how
she
had died. Léna watched the terror grow on her dead sister’s face.
    And she felt nothing. Only unease. Watching, and wondering what it was that sat in tears a few metres away.
    Léna had excused herself, run to her room, gone to bed fully clothed and unable to stop shivering. Sleep had come eventually, and when she had woken the urge to stay in her room was
overwhelming.
    But she couldn’t stay there forever. At last, Léna got up and ventured out to the landing. She opened the bathroom door