L’hiver

Winter is not merely a colder backdrop in the novel: for Billie, it names an inward season in which her skin seems to thicken, her heart to harden, and music to change with her mood. The cold months are set against summer’s openness, while the recollection of Annette’s breakup gives that seasonal language a history of hurt and emotional self-protection.

Winter as a bodily and musical state

Billie describes winter as a time when she feels soft and heavy, with her skin thickening and her heart becoming hard and frozen in her chest. In that state, she wants anything but the old-fashioned songs she enjoys in summer. The contrast is not simply a matter of taste: seasonal feeling alters what she can bear to hear, making music a measure of how open or defended she feels.

During the cold months, Billie listens to Martin Léon and learns the lyrics by heart. She also listens to Iron & Wine and cries to several songs, including the favorite of Duncan Riffle, whom she remembers as a love from the previous summer. Her winter listening thus carries summer forward in a changed form: Duncan is no longer present in the scene, but the music associated with him remains available as a focus for memory and tears.

Summer’s counterpoint

The contrast becomes explicit when Billie encounters Pierre in summer. He whistles a Joe Dassin song she loves in that season, but she says that in winter she feels different and wants to listen to something else. The same singer’s songs can belong to different emotional worlds depending on the season; summer permits a tenderness that winter’s hardened mood resists.

Elsewhere, summer is associated with looseness and shared movement rather than winter’s inwardness. Annette invites Billie to walk barefoot toward a cornfield, dismissing the possibility of getting dirty, and Billie takes off her boots. The moment is brief, but its willingness to accept discomfort and mess offers a concrete counterpoint to the bodily withdrawal Billie later associates with the cold months.

Annette and Louis: the remembered winter

Billie’s understanding of emotional hurt is shaped by Annette’s history with Louis, their neighbor and longtime boyfriend. They had been in love since they were eleven or twelve and had shared the milestones of adolescence: Louis supported Annette through starting secondary school, reassured her about a teenage blemish and braces, and was present for her first kiss, her graduation dance, the death of the family dog Ciseau, her move to college, and their parents’ divorce. Billie remembers them as calm and tender together, like a couple in a film headed toward a happy ending.

That ideal ended on a winter Tuesday, when Annette called home from school and later told Billie what Louis had said over the telephone. He no longer felt the butterflies and wanted to have sex with other girls to make up for lost time. Billie remembers Annette arriving in her room with a swollen, red, tearful face and mascara running over her cheeks. The season’s image of a frozen heart therefore sits beside a specific rupture: a relationship that had seemed dependable ended when Louis wanted experiences beyond it.

Billie connects that breakup to Annette’s subsequent way of behaving. She understands Annette’s fierce protectiveness as an attempt to spare her younger sister the pain of being rejected for other people, even while recognizing that Annette sometimes generalizes from her own experience and underestimates Billie’s adolescent resolve. Her account holds both truths together: Annette can misunderstand Billie, but she has also learned, through her own loss, what heartbreak costs.

Seasonal meaning and the novel’s time shifts

The winter material is presented through Billie’s retrospective first-person narration, which moves between a present summer encounter and memories of earlier summers and a winter breakup. This shifting order makes the season more than a date on the calendar. Pierre’s summer song prompts Billie to describe how winter changes her listening; that description opens onto the memory of Duncan and then toward Annette’s older heartbreak, connecting different experiences of love through the recurring contrast between warmth and emotional cold.

Winter consequently stands for a guarded state that Billie can recognize but has not simply adopted as a settled identity. She imagines a hardened heart as a way to escape vulnerability, yet her memories remain emotionally active: she cries to songs associated with Duncan and empathizes with the pain Annette suffered. The season’s chill is real in the novel’s emotional vocabulary, but so is the attachment that keeps breaking through it.