Julien was almost convinced that his contract with Le Progrès didn’t contain any clause that would allow him to be fired for killing a rival journalist during the New Year holidays.
Almost—though he would have to double-check to be sure.

Whatever the legal paperwork might ultimately say, Julien clearly couldn’t afford to wait for an answer. And the moment Francis collapsed onto the snow like a felled tree, he knew he would have to do something about it.

Something like, for example, lifting him off the ground and carrying him to the nearest doctor’s office, making sure Francis still had a pulse, and absolutely refraining from answering the traumatic questions of a group of children—whose interrogation already seemed to proceed from the assumption that they had a dead man, not just an injured one, on their hands.

Julien was shaken by how abruptly the sledding session had ended, but not so shaken that he couldn’t act decisively when needed. So yes, he would have carried an unconscious Francis as far as necessary… if not for the fact that Francis didn’t spend more than ten or fifteen seconds in Morpheus’s arms, managing to wake up on his own once the cold and dampness of the snow did their job.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course I am, this was nothing,” declared Francis—though it was clear this was his stock answer, since, still dizzy as he must have been, he made no move to pull away from Julien. “Just give me a minute.”

“If he’s not going to die yet, can we take back the sled now?” Louise inquired, pointing at the prized vehicle.

Julien had no intention of using it again, but it also didn’t seem right to leave Francis sitting in the snow, no matter that he hadn’t complained. He was about to ask the children if they could lend him the sled for just a few more minutes—long enough for the patient to regain his strength and agree to move elsewhere.

He was about to—but didn’t get the chance, as Francis promptly answered Louise’s question:

“Go on, take it. I never want to see that contraption again in my life.”

Which was unlikely, given how popular these vehicles were among the children, and how little discretion they showed in using them. But who was Julien to judge, after this experience?

Francis managed to get back on his feet after a couple of minutes, with Julien’s slight assistance. By then, the circle of children had already dispersed, leaving behind only a single piece of candy—which was offered to Francis, perhaps as compensation for having nearly been supplied with a murder weapon—and which he ate without protest.

Perhaps Francis’s faint spell had been caused by a drop in blood sugar, or by the stress of such an unexpected situation. Either way, it couldn’t have been anything serious, since after five minutes of rest on a nearby bench, he already felt strong enough to resume the day.

And with Francis’s almost immediate recovery, Julien’s worry evaporated as well.

“No offense,” he said, once he had made sure for the fourth time that Francis didn’t need a doctor, “but for someone who usually covers war stories, I thought you’d have more stamina for intense situations.”

“Writing a few opinion columns about a war is hardly the same as sitting in a vehicle about to smash into the nearest wall.”

“That offends me, I don’t drive that badly.” Though after a few seconds, Julien added, just to be sure: “You had your eyes closed the whole time, didn’t you?”

“If you’re about to complain that experiences like this should be lived with all senses alert…”

“No, no, nothing like that. Who knows—we might have ended up at a funeral if you had been watching.”

Because Julien knew well that he had nearly braked too late for a bush that, although it wasn’t on the original path, he had somehow managed to put directly in their way.

But there was no need to scare Francis further. If, with all the jolts of the sled, he hadn’t noticed any last-second swerves, and hadn’t realized how close they had come to the riverbank—how on earth had Julien even managed that, when he had chosen this hill precisely because even the worst drivers couldn’t possibly end up in the water by mistake?—then there was no point in telling him.

“I’ve never been a man of action,” admitted Francis—in a move Julien never thought he’d make without coercion. “Not as a child, when this kind of game was an everyday thing, and much less now. So I don’t have much… experience.”

Francis hesitated to say that last word aloud, perhaps because he wasn’t sure to what extent one was even supposed to be “experienced” in hurtling down snowy slopes at high speeds on such an unstable contraption.

“Neither do I,” Julien confessed simply. “When I was little, I preferred games that didn’t involve so much risk.”

“I don’t believe you. You? The kind of boy who’d sit playing marbles while the others nearly threw themselves off a cliff in harmless races to the nearest fence?”

“Fine, I admit I liked games that involved a bit more movement, but it wasn’t that big a deal.”

Well, it was a big deal. Julien had lied shamelessly, and Francis caught him instantly.

Maybe it was the unhealthy intuition of a journalist, or maybe they had simply spent enough time trading barbs to know a thing or two about each other.

And perhaps it wasn’t very hard to guess Julien’s preferences anyway: he was restless as an adult, so it was obvious to think he would have been the same—or worse—as a child.

“A-anyway,” Julien stammered, now a little flustered. If Francis could read him so quickly in this, what guaranteed he wouldn’t see through other white lies just as easily? “You know as well as I do that it doesn’t snow all year in Chambéry. It’s impossible I could’ve used the sled enough to become an expert.”

“No, that’s true. Otherwise I doubt you’d still be in one piece.” Francis smiled, and that was when Julien realized he wasn’t being serious—that he wasn’t trying to scold him for reckless driving, but quite the opposite.

Julien had lied about his childhood hobbies to do Francis a favor, thinking it might make him feel better if he hadn’t had the same chances to play as a boy. But as it turned out, Francis hadn’t missed out because of lack of opportunity, but simply because of preference.

Which explained the increasingly relaxed attitude he began to show.

The sled incident must have been the final push for Francis to drop his guard completely. For while his sharp remarks about anything in the village that caught his attention didn’t stop, his overall demeanor softened considerably. He now tolerated Julien’s company not merely as a necessary evil, but almost as that of a friend.

This wasn’t Julien’s imagination—though at first he did doubt his own perception of events, especially when he compared these interactions to when they had first met face to face. No, this was something tangible, and increasingly difficult to deny.

Thus, their next stop was the church.

Julien had thought he might leave this excursion for the evening, when the Christmas Eve mass would take place. But on second thought, he doubted he’d be able to get Francis out of his hotel room then: from his publications alone, it was more than clear that he was an atheist.

And while his irreverence wasn’t so extreme as to prevent him from setting foot in a place of worship, it was doubtful he would endure being there beyond a certain time limit—especially since, at the hour Julien had first intended to go, Francis was usually already in bed.

Julien could have let Francis sleep, giving him a break from all these improvised outings, but he didn’t like the idea of going to and from the church alone.

His fear of enduring the liturgy in solitude, he realized, was unfounded. He was convinced—and the crowded village streets confirmed—that he wouldn’t lack for company if he went through with this plan. Still, Julien couldn’t bring himself to choose that option: setting aside his own comfort (he wouldn’t die from spending a different kind of Christmas, after all), he didn’t want Francis to be left alone on Christmas Eve.

Not even for a single hour or two while he was away for that one purpose.

And so, not much later, Julien led the way to Saint-Genest, the parish church of the village, with Francis close on his heels. If he had been able to refuse to go—even at this more reasonable hour—he simply hadn’t.

Francis put up no resistance when Julien opened the church door for him, urging him to step inside. And once inside, though Francis showed no interest in taking part in any prayers, he also made no remarks about the faithful gathered there, nor about why it seemed so important for Julien to come here from time to time, and certainly not about religion itself.

Francis kept somewhat to the side, always lingering near the entrance or along the edges of the main nave, observing the building at his own pace and keeping his impressions to himself.

This gave Julien the chance to follow his own path—lighting a few candles at an altar and eventually sitting in one of the pews farthest from the pulpit. Julien had never been much for praying, nor did he consider himself especially devout. But he was a believer, and since childhood he had enjoyed going to church. Not so much for the liturgy itself, but because being there forced him into a period of introspection.

Lately, he had tried not to think too much about his own problems. In fact, the arrival of the holidays, and the subsequent invitation to spend them in Chambéry, had given him the perfect excuse to ignore everything happening at his office—for now postponing the solution he was searching for.

Not that work was going badly, per se… In a way, one might even say he had been quite successful, considering that his family’s initial expectation—that he stay in his hometown without pursuing higher education or a different career—had been far surpassed.

But Julien no longer saw it that way.

Sure, he had achieved his dream of seeing his writings published in a regional newspaper. He got along well with his boss and coworkers, and he enjoyed a certain stability. Yet sometimes a doubt gnawed at him: What if he wasn’t making as much progress as he had imagined?

Despite having a guaranteed place in the pages of Le Progrès, things had long felt somewhat stagnant. Julien rarely appeared on the front pages, often sharing his section with other aspiring epistolary writers. His art criticism was somewhat better received, but that didn’t mean he was invited to every artistic event in the region. In the end, he was just one author among many, all striving to climb toward that success which might one day grant them national recognition, or the chance to publish books that would be sold in every bookstore.

That goal still felt very far away, and Julien sometimes wondered whether it was still worth spending most of the year away from his family in order to pursue it.