That morning, Françoise took her coffee, settled into the comfortable side basket of her old motorcycle, and took a drag from her unfiltered cigarette.
Everything suggested another freezing winter was coming to the small, quiet town of Oblik, on the edge of France, far from the centre of events — and that was not necessarily a bad thing.
She might no longer call herself a journalist for Libération or L’Humanité, but she still worked best alone. Here, she had a voice — a small voice, perhaps — but it was her own, and no one, absolutely no one, told her what to say.
She still didn’t know what the coming days would bring. For a few more hours, the tiny island would enjoy its barren solitude in the Iroise Sea, before becoming the main headline on every news site — so unexpectedly that it would occupy experts and non-experts alike for decades.
