“Your Honor… who will my little sister, who’s in the freezer, live with?”
Six-year-old Malo’s voice fell across the courtroom like a cup dropped onto marble.
For a split second, no one moved in the Nanterre courthouse. The clerk stopped typing. His father’s lawyer’s mouth remained slightly open. The family court judge, who had just granted Julien Morel primary custody of the child, slowly looked up from his file.
And Julien paled.
Claire didn’t understand at first. Her body understood before her mind. Her stomach tightened, her throat closed, her fingers clenched on the wooden bench.
For seven months, she had been told she was fragile. Too fragile to raise Malo. Too broken by the disappearance of her four-year-old daughter, Zoé. Too unstable since the searches, the posters plastered all over Rueil-Malmaison, the anonymous calls, the sleepless nights, the meltdowns in the supermarket when she saw a yellow dress go by at the end of an aisle.
Julien, for his part, had played the brave father.
He had cried on local television. He had held Claire close in front of the cameras. He had whispered to anyone who would listen:
“I have to stay strong for our son.”
And that morning, in his navy blue jacket, his eyes just the right amount of red, he had convinced everyone.
Claire had lost her daughter.
And now she had just lost her son.
Until that sentence.
Malo, sitting next to a social worker, looked at the judge seriously. He wasn’t trying to provoke him. He didn’t even know he had just torn off the mask of the adult world. He asked again, more quietly:
“Dad said she was sleeping very cold.” But if I go to his place, she’ll be all alone?
Claire brought a hand to her mouth. No cry came out. Only a broken, animalistic gasp, then she bent over and vomited on the courtroom’s shiny floor. A murmur of panic spread. Julien knocked over his glass of water. His lawyer immediately stood up.
