Borrowed Time

In December 1998, Chloe wanders through her aunt’s apartment in Toulon, France. She has only a few hours to herself before her father’s sister comes out of surgery. The small flat — which once belonged to the thirty-two-year-old writer’s paternal grandparents — has been the only constant familial home she’s known. It served as an immovable point, complete with its immovable characters (Grand’-mère, Grand-père, Tante Denise), during years of geographic upheaval that saw her, her sister, and her parents bounce between Switzerland, Australia, the United States, France, and Canada. Now its emptiness — both of her grandparents died in the past few years — strikes her. She notices the stillness of the objects surrounding her:

Having been repositories of history, of family, of a kind of private magic, would they now simply become again things, the dingy, broken detritus of an anonymous past? If nobody lived here, if nobody...