Adam

Adam, the younger child of Myriam and Paul, comes to know Louise through the repeated rhythms of care: her voice, her footsteps, her presence in the apartment, and the attention she gives his small discoveries. He laughs and falls while looking for her, later reaches toward her even in his mother’s arms, and turns to her as a witness to his progress. These intimate gestures make him part of the household’s emotional life, but they also expose how completely a child depends on the adults who care for him—and how that dependence can be exploited.

Identity and Place in the Family

Adam is still very young, unable to speak clearly, and reliant on others for daily care. He lives with his parents, Myriam and Paul, and his older sister, Mila. The evidence presents him chiefly through physical responses and ordinary domestic scenes rather than through speech or independent action: he laughs, falls, cries, reaches, and follows the people around him.

Louise’s place in the family becomes visible in Adam’s attachment to her. When she returns to the apartment after an absence, he recognizes her before Myriam offers him forward. He struggles in his mother’s arms, having heard Louise’s voice, recognized the smell of her talcum powder, and identified the light sound of her step on the parquet floor. Myriam, smiling, presents him to Louise’s affection. His recognition is a sensory catalogue of familiarity: the nanny is not merely someone who looks after him but a presence whose voice, scent, and movement have become part of his world.

Play, Care, and Dependence

Louise’s games with the children make their reliance on her visible in a different way. In her favorite version of hide-and-seek, she disappears without warning and offers no rules or reassurance. Adam follows Mila as the children search; he laughs so hard that he cannot stand steadily and falls repeatedly onto his bottom. When Louise remains hidden, however, the game turns frightening. Adam becomes prostrate and sobs, calling for her with the last syllable of her name swallowed in his distress. Louise watches without emerging, while the children’s playful search gives way to panic.

The scene exposes the unequal terms of the game. Louise chooses when to vanish and when to end the suspense; Adam is too young to understand that her absence is staged. His tears do not persuade her to come out. Care and play, ordinarily sources of comfort, are made into a test whose terms only Louise controls. The episode does not establish what Adam understands afterward, but it shows how quickly his confidence depends on the caregiver’s return.

That dependence is sustained by the work Louise performs beyond play. When Myriam tells her that it is late and she can go home, Louise continues cleaning the bathtub, folding towels, emptying the washing machine, preparing the children’s bed, and beginning dinner. She gently pushes Myriam back from the saucepan and tells her to rest and enjoy the children, promising that she will prepare their meal and that Myriam will hardly notice her. As Louise takes on more tasks, Myriam increasingly accepts this care; the children’s home life is held together by labor that is both intimate and easy to overlook. Adam’s attachment develops inside that arrangement, where the person meeting his daily needs is also becoming indispensable to his parents.

Separation and Recognition

The novel gives Adam little independent power to interpret the adults’ absences, but it shows how strongly he registers them. When Louise returns, his recognition is immediate and embodied: sound and smell reach him before he is in her arms. He presses against Myriam’s chest to get to the nanny, and Myriam responds by offering him to her. The exchange makes the family’s dependence on Louise visible through a child who cannot explain it. For Adam, the return is not an employment matter or a shift in household arrangements; it is the reappearance of someone he knows through the textures of everyday life.

Later, he sees Louise outside the family apartment. Myriam spots her by chance from the car, standing under a streetlamp on a pavement far from their usual surroundings, and wonders where she is going when she is not with them. Adam, hearing his mother say the nanny’s name, looks out of the window too. He points and cries, “C’est ma nounou,” unable to reconcile the familiar caregiver with the possibility that she might live elsewhere, alone, or walk without pushing a stroller or holding a child’s hand. His reaction marks a limit in his understanding, but also a revelation for Myriam: Louise has a life beyond their household, though the children have known her primarily as someone who belongs within its routines.

The Household’s Fraying Order

As Louise becomes more withdrawn, Adam’s ordinary need for attention takes on a more precarious significance. She no longer finds consolation in the children as she once did. Her stories lose their direction and their vividness; her games have less energy, and Mila asks her to find something else. Louise still loves watching the children, especially the way Adam turns toward her to share his progress and joy, as if his gestures were intended for her alone. That attentive bond remains, but it now exists alongside her exhaustion and an inability to meet the children’s repeated demands with her former patience.

The apartment’s routines begin to falter. Louise leaves the television on throughout the day, despite Myriam’s rule against letting the children watch it. Mila knows not to repeat the words she hears in reports about terrorism and death. When the children turn from the screen to one another, Mila pushes Adam against a wall, and he roars before jumping at her face. Louise does not turn around. She remains fixed on the television while Adam and Mila play, quarrel, and ask to go outside. His place in these scenes is not that of a child who can repair the household’s disorder: he is among those exposed to it, dependent on the adult who has stopped responding.

The Final Routine and Narrative Significance

The last evidence concerning Adam returns to an ordinary act of care: bathing. In Nina Dorval’s planned reenactment of the murders, she intends to repeat Louise’s movements, test the water with her hand, and call the children to the bath. The investigation asks Paul whether Adam and Mila liked water, whether they usually hesitated to undress, and whether they enjoyed splashing among their toys. It also considers whether they might have been surprised or wary at being bathed at four in the afternoon. These questions turn a familiar household routine into a way of reconstructing what happened, without granting Adam a voice in the inquiry.

The remembered call, “Les enfants, venez. Vous allez prendre un bain,” carries the force of a command that would ordinarily gather the children for care. In the novel’s closing approach to the crime, the bath is no longer simply a comforting domestic ritual: it is the setting toward which Nina’s reconstruction returns as she tries to make sense of the children’s deaths. Adam’s character is built from gestures of dependence—searching, crying, reaching, recognizing—and the final reconstruction gives those gestures their tragic context. He is not presented as responsible for, or capable of understanding, the adults’ failures. His vulnerability makes the cost of their household’s collapsing care concrete.