Chapter 1 — The First Day
“Are you looking for someone?”
Florence turned around.
The girl had to be twenty. Twenty-two, maybe. A canvas tote over one shoulder, a laptop tucked under her arm, and that perfectly natural way of standing in the middle of the corridor as if she were exactly where she was supposed to be.
Unlike Florence.
“Sorry?”
“Are you looking for someone?”
Florence looked at the lecture-theatre door. Then at the girl.
“Yes.”
She took a breath.
“Me.”
The girl frowned.
Florence smiled.
“I’m a student.”
“Oh! Sorry!”
Of course.
Oh! Sorry!
Florence was fifty-two. She knew exactly what the girl had thought.
A mother. A lecturer. A secretary. Possibly a lost woman looking for the toilets.
Anything but a student.
“No harm done.”
“You’re on the Master’s?”
“Yes.”
The girl’s face lit up.
“Me too! Which track are you on?”
Florence told her, and for a few seconds they talked normally.
Two students on the first day of term.
Then the girl checked her phone.
“I have to go. Good luck!”
“Thanks. You too.”
Florence watched her disappear down the corridor.
Good luck.
She was going to need it.
She put her hand on the door handle. Through the door, she could hear dozens of voices.
She could have left.
No one had made her come.
No one even knew she was standing there at that precise moment.
Well. Her children did.
Aude had sent three hearts and added: “Go for it, Mum. And buy yourself a bag. That thing really does make you look like you’re going to the office.”
Florence had kept the bag.
On principle.
Xavier, on the other hand, had gone quiet when she told him she had enrolled.
“You’re really going back to university now?”
She had said yes.
“What for?”
The question had hurt more than she wanted to admit.
“To finish this time.”
He had not tried to stop her. He had not said he thought it was wonderful either.
“If that’s what you want…”
That was all.
Florence had understood that, even in his thirties, her son had only ever seen his mother as the woman who had never needed to work.
Didier knew nothing.
That thought alone was enough to make her open the door.
⁂
She chose a seat at the back.
Mistake.
Everyone who came in after her had to walk past, and Florence had the impression each of them looked at her.
No one was looking at her.
She knew that.
At twenty, you did not spend much time studying a fifty-two-year-old woman sitting in a lecture theatre.
The thought was not particularly comforting.
She took out a notebook.
A real one.
Made of paper.
Around her, laptops opened one after another.
Florence looked at her notebook. Then at the screens.
Excellent.
She was officially a fossil.
“You’re right.”
Florence turned her head.
A man had just sat down two seats away.
In his fifties. Maybe a little older. Pale shirt, dark jacket, glasses he had taken off to clean.
Finally, someone her age.
She felt a degree of relief that was almost indecent.
“Sorry?”
He nodded towards her notebook.
“Paper. Less likely to crash.”
“Are you a student?”
He looked at her.
“Would that surprise you?”
Florence felt her cheeks warm.
“No. I mean… I…”
He smiled.
“I’m joking.”
Then he stood.
“And no.”
He walked down the steps of the lecture theatre.
Florence followed him with her eyes.
The man set a few folders on the desk, connected his laptop and turned to face the students.
Shit.
Professor.
She had just asked a professor if he was a student.
First day.
Eleven minutes.
A record.
“Good morning, everyone. Antoine Delmas. We’ll be spending part of this semester together.”
Florence lowered her eyes to her notebook.
She wrote the date.
Then:
Antoine Delmas.
She immediately crossed out the name.
Why had she written his name?
Because he had just said it.
That was why.
Absolutely no other reason.
Underneath, she wrote:
Seminar — Methodology.
Much better.
She was fifty-two.
Recently divorced.
She had not come back to university to watch a professor take off his glasses.
She had come to reclaim something.
Something she had left here thirty years earlier.
Herself.
⁂
At the end of the class, Florence stayed seated a few seconds too long.
“Ma’am?”
She jumped.
Antoine Delmas was looking at her.
The lecture theatre was almost empty.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes. I was thinking.”
“Usually a good sign at a university.”
She looked up.
He was smiling.
“Are you always this funny with your students?”
“Only the ones who ask whether I’m a student.”
Florence closed her eyes.
“Are you really going to hold that against me?”
“Probably all semester.”
She stood.
“In that case, I can still drop out.”
The words came out before she could stop them.
Antoine stopped smiling.
“Are you planning to?”
Florence went still.
He could not know.
England. Didier. Xavier. Aude. Her abandoned degree. The thirty years that had followed.
“No.”
This time she did not hesitate.
“Not this time.”
He nodded.
“Then I’ll see you next week.”
She had almost reached the door when he called after her.
“Ms…”
He checked the sheet in front of him.
“Florence?”
Hearing her first name in his voice had a wildly disproportionate effect on her.
“Yes?”
“Keep the notebook.”
“Why?”
“It suits you.”
She walked out wearing a smile she found completely ridiculous.
She had not come back to university for a man.
It would have been sensible to remember that.
* * *
Antoine’s class was the last one of the day.
By five-thirty, Florence had already decided three times that she found him attractive and four times that it did not matter.
He was walking between the rows when he asked a question about the text they had been given.
No one answered.
Florence reread the passage.
“The problem,” she said at last, “is that you’re asking the question as though the character had chosen.”
Antoine stopped.
“You don’t think he did?”
“I think we can call a lot of things ‘choices’ afterwards because it makes a story neater.”
Several heads turned.
So did Antoine’s.
“And you don’t like neat stories?”
“I do. When they don’t lie.”
A smile crossed his face.
“Your name?”
“Florence.”
He waited.
“Florence…?”
She gave him her surname.
He repeated it before resuming the lecture.
Beside her, Léa typed something into her phone.
Florence leaned over.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I’m allowed.”
The moment she left the lecture theatre, Florence felt her phone buzz.
Léa had added her to the “English Master’s — Year 1” group.
First message from Mehdi:
“Delmas already knows Florence’s name. Just putting that out there.”
Florence looked up.
“Seriously?”
Léa put on an innocent face.
“Welcome to university.”
Florence should have left the group.
Instead she replied:
“Delmas knows yours too. It’s his job.”
Three seconds later:
“SHE ANSWERED.”
Florence burst out laughing in the middle of the corridor.
Perhaps that was the moment, even more than when she had walked into the lecture theatre, when she understood she really had begun something again.
