The Mark of Chance••√•• Pure Love

chapitre : 7

Two weeks. Fourteen days spent trying to rebuild the crumbling walls of her life. Marina had returned to the office, swallowed sandwiches in front of her screen, done her Sunday jog along the quays. She had imposed an iron discipline on herself, a schedule so packed it was meant to leave no room for introspection. Cardio in the morning. Sorting cupboards in the evening. Anything to occupy the mind and exhaust the body.

Yet, in the hollow of the night, when the silence of her studio became too heavy, the images returned. Chris's gaze, full of an ocean of unspoken things. Léna's distorted face, beautiful and monstrous in her fury. The USB key, entrusted to an anonymous delivery service, which contained the confessions of a broken man. She had listened to it once, only once, before storing it at the back of a drawer, like locking a ghost in a box.

"It's over," she repeated to herself each morning in the mirror, staring at her own dark-circled eyes. "They made their choices. I'm making mine. The one to move forward."

But her body seemed to refuse to turn the page.

It started with a diffuse heaviness, a fatigue that never left her, even after eight hours of sleep. Then came the nausea. Not violent, not yet. Just a persistent sickness, a sudden disgust for the smell of the office coffee, which had been her companion for years. She attributed it to stress, to nervous exhaustion. Her stomach was permanently knotted, a ball of angst and sorrow that compressed her diaphragm and stole her breath. She felt like she was swallowing cotton, breathing through a thick filter.

"You look awful, Marina," Paul, a nice colleague, had told her by the coffee machine. "Are you sure you're okay?"

— "It's the flu, I think," she lied, averting her gaze. "Or a bad stomach bug. It'll pass."

She refused to consider the hospital. The white coats, the questions, the forms. It would have felt like giving too concrete, too medical a reality to what seemed to her an illness of the soul. Her malaise was intimately linked to the drama that had just unfolded; to treat it would have been to betray the pain, to strip it of its legitimacy. It was her burden to bear, the physical proof of the storm she had weathered.

This Saturday morning, she had decided to take her mind off things by going to the market. To buy herself flowers, colorful fruit, cook a proper meal. To rediscover a taste for simple things. But as soon as she entered the market hall, the assault of smells sent a wave of nausea up her throat. The fishmonger's stall, the overripe cheese, the heady perfume of the flowers… everything blended into an aggressive, sensory mush. She rushed to a bench, her face pale, waiting for the dizziness to pass.

Sitting there, watching people go about their business, she felt a deep despair wash over her. She couldn't even do her grocery shopping anymore. The whole world reminded her of her own vulnerability.

"So, on a hunger strike?"

The voice made her jump. Paul was standing in front of her, a net bag of vegetables in his hand. He had a shy smile.

"I… no. Just a little dizzy."

— "It does that to me too, the Saturday market," he joked. "Too many people, too much noise."

He sat down beside her without asking permission. She was surprised, but not annoyed. His presence was simple, without ulterior motives.

"Listen," he continued, his smile fading. "I don't mean to intrude, but… since you came back from your sister's, you haven't been yourself. You're transparent. And this morning, you look like you'd blow away in the first strong wind."

Marina felt tears welling up in her eyes. This solicitude, after weeks of silence and unspoken words, was almost too much for her.

"It's… complicated, Paul."

— "I don't doubt it is. But you know, complications can sometimes be shared. Or drowned in a good restaurant. Not for lunch today, of course, given how you look," he said, seeing her pale at the thought of food. "But one of these days. Whenever you want."

He stood up, patted her gently on the shoulder.

"Take care of yourself, Marina. Really."

She watched him walk away, his net bag of vegetables in hand. A good guy. Simple. Normal. Everything she should have desired. So why did her heart remain frozen? Why, even in this innocuous exchange, did her mind constantly return to Chris? To the way he stood, the tone of his voice, the sadness inhabiting his gaze.

The lump in her throat tightened. She went home empty-handed, abandoning her project of flowers and cooking. She collapsed onto her sofa, exhausted, defeated by the mere effort of having tried to live normally.

Evening was falling when the phone rang. It was her mother.

"Sweetie, how are you? You've been so quiet lately. And Léna isn't giving any news either. Did you two have a fight?"

The innocent question pierced her chest.

"No, Mom. Everything's fine. Just… a bit tired."

— "You work too much, sweetie. You need to think about yourself. About making a nice life for yourself. You're so young."

A nice life. The phrase felt unbearably cruel. She hung up as quickly as she could, pretending someone was at the door.

Standing in the middle of her living room, she felt a new wave of nausea, stronger this time, twist her stomach. She ran to the bathroom and bent over the toilet, her body racked with dry heaves. Nothing came up, just the bitterness of bile and the painful strain.

When she straightened up, her face clammy and her legs weak, her reflection in the mirror showed a stranger. A pale woman with dark circles, marked by a sorrow eating her from the inside.

"This can't go on," she whispered to the woman in the mirror. "It has to stop."

Her vow to stop thinking about them was a delusion. They were inside her. In every thought, in every sensation of malaise. Chris, Léna, their toxic marriage, this impossible love… it had all taken possession of her body, like a parasite.

She went back to lie on the sofa, curled under a blanket, shivering. The promise of living her life as before was broken. Something had changed, fundamentally. And as she closed her eyes, a thought, terrifying and still formless, began to germinate in a corner of her mind, a place she refused to explore. A thought linked to morning sickness, unusual fatigue, a late cycle.

But no. It was impossible. Absurd. It was just the stress. The grief.

It had to be.

She curled up deeper under the blanket, seeking warmth in vain, as the silence of the night enveloped her malaise, giving it all the space it needed to grow.