What She Came Back For

Chapter Originals

Nadine Roux left Ardres at seventeen with a bag and four hundred francs, eleven days after her father was taken out of his own workshop in front of about ninety people. She is twenty-eight now and she has come back with a company behind her and a lawyer on a retainer, and within about four hours of her car appearing on the square the entire town has decided what this is. They think she has come for Gérard Vasseur, who is sixty-nine and who owns the mill and the yard and half the square, and who made a statement in the spring of the year she was seventeen that ruined a man in eleven weeks. They are wrong, and they are going to go on being wrong for a long time, and the only person in Ardres who has ever guessed right is a man of thirty-three who repairs boats at the bottom of the hill and who was twenty-two when it happened and who told the truth to four separate people and was not believed by any of them.