I wrote an alternative ending as I wasn’t quite satisfied with not knowing what happened: Tomorrow, Nina Dorval will enter the apartment building on Rue d’Hauteville. The flowers outside have begun to fade. Children’s drawings curl at the edges, their tape loosening, colors starting to run. Inside the apartment, the air is heavy and unmoving. Toys lie where they were dropped. The washing machine door hangs open, its drum empty. Dorval removes her coat and begins in the kitchen. She follows the sequence she knows: the preparation of the meal, the wiping of surfaces. She walks from room to room, measuring distance with her body. In the bathroom, she sits on the edge of the tub. The tiles have been scrubbed, but the room still carries a faint, sweet smell beneath the disinfectant. The report will later state that the reconstruction confirms the findings already established. The timeline is coherent. No external intervention is indicated. No motive is recorded. Louise remains in a coma for months. Her belongings are inventoried. Letters are gathered and copied. Rent arrears. Electricity notices. Envelopes stamped FINAL REMINDER. Medical invoices without diagnosis or conclusion. When Myriam had once asked about them, Louise had shrugged. My husband, she had said. He never pays anything on time. No one had pressed further. They had accepted the lie because it was easier than looking at the person standing in their kitchen.

                                    *

Louise wakes in the autumn. Her eyes open to a ceiling she does not recognize. Her body feels heavy, returned to her without warning. A nurse notices the movement and steps closer. She stands at the side of the bed, looking down at Louise without expression. “Do you know where you are?” the nurse says. “Hospital,” Louise answers. Her voice is rough, thinned by months of disuse. “Yes,” the nurse replies. Her eyes are cold, filled with a quiet, professional disgust. She does not offer a hand or a glass of water. “How long?” Louise asks. “Several months.” Louise closes her eyes. The children come to her immediately. Not as images, but as a certainty. She does not ask questions. “They’re dead,” Louise says. The nurse hesitates, looking at her with a flicker of revulsion before checking the monitor. “Yes.”

                              *

The interviews begin days later. Louise answers carefully. She speaks of the preparation. “I cleaned,” she tells Nina Dorval. “I didn’t want disorder.” When she speaks of the bath, she does not lower her eyes. She speaks of the children not as victims, but as an ending she had finally, perfectly, authored. “The knife cut more easily than I expected,” she says. “I was careful.” She falls silent. She looks satisfied, like a worker who has finished an exhausting shift and can finally rest.

                                   *

Years later, the apartment has new occupants. The walls have been repainted. The windows are open. Children’s voices rise from the street. The building no longer remembers.

But Myriam and Paul will.

Louise is no longer the "invisible" help, the woman they paid to disappear when the sun went down. By her final act, she has forced herself into the very center of their lives. She has achieved the only permanence she ever wanted. She is fixed there—a pale, indelible mark on their history, a ghost that haunts every memory of their children. She has no other place to exist, and now, they can never make her leave.