It was the last class before winter break, and the air in Mme Fournier’s classroom carried the stale warmth of an overworked radiator and the faint, sweet ghost of someone’s contraband orange peel. Outside, the December dusk was already pulling a grey blanket over the suburbs of Lyon. Inside, thirty-four pairs of eyes were fixed on a single sheet of paper.

Mme Fournier walked the aisles, reading over shoulders. She saw the standard answers. She saw the clever ones. Then she reached Sami’s page. She stopped. Patrie. She looked at the boy—the careful way he held his pen, the slight tremor in his jaw. She knew nothing of Aleppo. But she knew the weight of that word.

Two rows behind him, Chloé read the same sentence and felt a different cold. Her silence had a different geography. Her house was a quiet villa in the wealthy sixth arrondissement. Her silence was the sound of her parents not speaking at dinner after her mother’s third glass of wine. Her silence was the closed door of her father’s study, the locked drawer in her mother’s bedside table. The house where I learned to be silent was not a house; it was a country. She thought of the word confinement —not just the COVID lockdowns, but the smaller, permanent lockdown of a family that performed happiness for guests and collapsed inward like a dying star when the door clicked shut.

She reached Chloé’s desk. Royaume. She glanced at the girl’s too-bright smile, the dark crescents of exhaustion beneath her eyes that makeup couldn’t fully hide.