It was the summer of 1986 in Aix-en-Provence, not the one of luminous canvases and open-air markets, but the aristocratic enclave hidden beyond ordinary routes, where houses breathed an expensive silence and the trees seemed bent beneath the weight of old secrets. There, every immaculate façade concealed small moral ruins, every family sustained an impeccable choreography of appearances, and you, at only eight years old, already understood that elegance was merely another form of disguise.

Brought from a forgotten fragment of New Orleans, where the heat was raw and absences more honest, you arrived as an elegant mistake meant to be corrected. The illegitimate daughter of Harry Delaire, you were not introduced, only tolerated. Still, there was in you an uneasy persistence, something that did not ask for acceptance, only permanence. You infiltrated the heirs like a discreet crack in marble, observing, absorbing, learning the silent language of that world.

And then there was Artie Van Houseïnberg. Nine years old, eyes of an almost translucent blue, so pale they seemed to fix on nothing and yet register everything. There was something wrong in his stillness, a discipline that did not belong to childhood. He smiled as one executes a task, and you only you—noticed the dissonance. It was not open cruelty; it was precision. Not impulse, but intention. You saw. And he knew that you saw.

What followed was a silent liturgy of small violences. Soil mixed into your food with almost artistic delicacy, larvae waking you before dawn, calculated footsteps behind you in corridors too long to be innocent. Subtle shoves, measured frights, carefully induced falls. He was never caught. You never reported him. There was something at stake that no word could contain.

Until the lake. Behind the Houseïnberg mansion, where the water was dark enough to swallow reflections and memory alike, you pushed him without warning. It was not rage, but a raw need for response, as if the world demanded an equivalent gesture. He dragged you down with him, and what followed was a brief shared drowning, a silent struggle beneath the murky surface. There, for the first time, something in him broke. His eyes reacted, alive, almost human, and his mouth, distorted by water, formed words you would carry like a vow: I hate you. You were pulled out by maids hands, wrapped in muffled scandal and expensive fabric. Nothing was said. Nothing existed. And yet, from that day on, you were never apart again.

What was born in that lake was not hatred, at least not in any ordinary sense. It was a twisted, intimate, almost ritual bond. You became accomplices to secrets you dared not name, guardians of a kind of truth that would not survive the light. At times, you were found together in scenes that demanded impossible explanations small bodies discarded, stains that did not belong to chance but in that world, money did not merely silence; it legitimized silence.

Now it was 1996, and something in the world felt displaced. The news carried a different weight, a growing frequency of disappearances and murders that slipped beyond the comfort of easy explanations. Still, within the bubble, concerns followed: universities, futures shaped by surnames, destinies drafted with the precision of invisible contracts. Alice Haddock with her methodical ambition, Phillips Alliere orbiting inherited certainties, Doryan Ivory undecided by luxury, Robert Luther anticipating a world already his.

And you were in Artie’s room. The space was dense, almost reverential. Surgical instruments arranged like relics, robotic prototypes suspended like ex-votos to some strange devotion. The radio murmured low, a persistent whisper, leaking fragments about Tina Burton’s disappearance. He did not look at you at first. His fingers moved across the papers with near mechanical gaze.

“There are ways around it,” he said, controlled, precise. “Same path, less noise.” He noticed your reaction to Tina Burton’s name, a shift in breath, a silent fracture. “Did you know her…or is it something else?” Silence thicken.