“I didn’t ask you to leave, I said. It was your idea, and if you didn’t want to get your feet wet, love, you shouldn’t have embarked. I didn’t push you into the water, I didn’t fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb and put you in your wretched leaky boat.”

The novel opens in medias res, in the sense that it opens in the midst of the argument that constitutes its plot, with the narrator already mounting a defense before the reader knows the charge. The phrasing “love” is an ironic endearment, the kind used to dismiss someone who is being unreasonable. In this context, it expresses contempt, not love. By starting here, Delecroix puts the reader inside the operator’s logic before introducing the dead, so that the rest of the book can test that logic against what actually happened. The line returns as a refrain throughout, which speaks to self-justification as a defense against guilt.

“These guys are unbelievable, one minute they jump in the water, the next they’re practically shouting at you for not throwing them the lifebuoy fast enough, cheeky, I call it.”

This is the narrator complaining to her colleague, Julien, at three o’clock in the morning, and the tone is one of genuine annoyance at being inconvenienced. The complaint reveals that her professional calm hides a steady current of resentment toward the people whose calls she answers. The casual word “cheeky” is what makes the line damning: It treats a drowning person as a rude customer.