9. French Riviera, three hours and forty minutes before dawn

She woke up from a nightmare; it was too hot in the bedroom and that always made her sleep restless. She couldn’t remember what the dream was about, but she woke up, beads of sweat running down her forehead and flushed cheeks.

She sat upright on the bed - the bed sheets enveloping her still damp from her troubled perspiration - and stared at the window, catching her breath, while Saul lay, asleep, and gently snoring, motionless, beside her. She took in a deep breath of the warm salty air flowing in from the open windows overlooking the sea. The gentle rhythmic beat of the waves pounding against the pebbled shore, the flutter of the glittter-white mesh curtains, rasping in sweet swells on the white wooden framework, lulled her back to sleep. She wiped the sweat from her face, still breathing deep, and swallowed an empty mouthful, her eyes caught in the fluttering curtains. Mellow sounds, as if played by a somewhat clandestine orchestra, playing in the blue shadows of the bedroom, filled the air: Saul’s muffled snoring, the curtains’ rasp, the waves’ thump, an occasional distant shriek of a seagull, her own breath, the secret beating of her heart. She began tuning into these sounds, unconsciously rearranging them into some order, like the beat of a melody or the pace of a song she’d forgotten and was trying to remember. Albeit tired, she could no longer go back to sleep now. Stretching and flexing her muscles in a slow paused way so as not to wake Saul up, she looked at the alarm clock. 2 in the morning. Eight o’clock in the evening in New York.