The protagonist, Hélène, is in her early thirties: a curator at a provincial museum, precise in posture, private in grief. She carries a photograph of a faded summer—the only tangible memory of a child who will not come back. Opposite her is Marc, a small-time journalist whose vitality is both charm and threat. Marc moves through the world with a reporter’s hunger, collecting confidences, trinkets, and secrets as if each might become the one sentence that finally explains him.