He read it. It runs to two and a half pages and I have a copy and I am going to give you the parts that matter.
My father wrote it on the fourteenth of January, 2019.
Seraphine sat in the front row in black Chanel — I am not guessing, my cousin’s wife identified it — with a tissue that she pressed to the corner of each eye at intervals and which never once appeared to be wet.
Lucan and I sat two rows back with our families.
I could feel people looking. That’s not paranoia; my aunt told me afterward it was the main topic in the parking lot. People would glance at her, then back at us, then away.
At about twenty past eleven, in the middle of the second reading, Bertrand Ozel came up the side aisle.
He is seventy-one years old and he has buried most of this town. He moves very slowly and very quietly and he does not interrupt services.
He walked to the front row, crouched down beside Seraphine, and said something in her ear that took about eight seconds.
And I watched every ounce of color go out of that woman’s face in real time.
I want to describe it properly because I have thought about it every day since.
It was not embarrassment. I have seen her embarrassed. It was not anger.
Her mouth opened slightly and she put one hand flat on the pew in front of her like a person on a boat.
And then she shook her head. Twice. Small.
And Bertrand Ozel said something else, and she closed her eyes.
Lucan leaned over to me and said, under his breath, “Here we go.”
I want to tell you what I thought was happening, because it’s important that you know exactly what kind of person I was in that pew.
I thought she’d been caught.
I genuinely, in that moment, believed that a lawyer had arrived, or a creditor, or a woman from somewhere, and that whatever six years of that marriage had actually been was about to come apart in front of two hundred people at eleven twenty in the morning.
