No one else here: too cold or too early or both. She listens to the wind sift through the filigree of the crown of the gazebo, and the walls of the maze hold steady around them, Paris murmuring below, the drowsy purr of a Saturday morning. “You’ll be twelve next Saturday, won’t you, Michel?” “Finally.” “You are in a hurry to be twelve?” “Mother says I can drive the moped when I am twelve.” “Ah.” Marie-Laure laughs. “The moped.” Beneath her fingernails, the frost makes billions of tiny diadems and coronas on the slats of the bench, a lattice of dumbfounding complexity.
