He stepped outside in his slippers. The ground was clean, dark, and final. For the first time, he felt truly alone. No trace of all those years. No trace of Céleste's laughter caught in the branches.
Margot did not understand. She saw decay. He saw geography—the map of every autumn he had lived, every ending that had also been a beginning. Feuille tombee
He did not imagine a message this time. He simply heard Céleste's voice, as clear as the morning air: "Feuille tombée... mais pas oubliée." He stepped outside in his slippers
Now he sat with the leaf from the windowsill pressed between the pages of a book he could no longer read. His daughter, Margot, visited on Sundays. She would bring soup and sigh at the mess of leaves on the ground. "Papa, let me rake," she would say. No trace of all those years
That night, a storm came. Auguste lay in bed listening to the wind tear at the linden. Branches scraped the roof like fingers. And then, silence. When he woke, the courtyard was bare. The leaves were gone—blown into the neighboring field, the river, the unknown.
One morning, a single leaf landed on his windowsill. It was not special—brown at the edges, gold at the heart, a small bruise of decay near the stem. But Auguste picked it up and turned it over. On its underside, written in the fine veins, he imagined a message: You are still here.