They were all having a drink in Laura’s house. It was quite a long time since they did not all gather together, although, she and Maurice sometimes had the chance to meet over the last two years because they happened to work in the same street, two buildings far from each other, and so first occasionally, and then intentionally, in a French café in a side street.

“I always remembered me sliding away from big gatherings of people, but I didn’t remember you doing the same” she once confessed to him in front of a Cannel.

He avoided the question that time.

And that was true indeed, even at that party, there was something about him that looked so different from a few years ago. He did not really engage with people anymore, he kept himself distant, like if empathy was not in his range of emotions anymore, protecting his inner side with a thick layer of what it seemed distrust and bad experience.