Louise and Wafa

Louise and Wafa are friends in a world where intimacy is scarce and disclosure is risky. Wafa is Louise’s only friend in the neighborhood, the person with whom she shares her hopes of remaining indispensable to the Massé family. Yet their friendship is marked by discretion: even Wafa reveals little about Louise to the other nannies, and when the police question her, she can report what she witnessed that morning but cannot explain Louise’s conduct or whereabouts. Their bond offers Louise a confidante, but it cannot protect either woman from the social isolation and uncertainty surrounding domestic work—or from the investigation that follows the children’s murder.

A friendship on the margins

Louise has made only one friend in the neighborhood: Wafa. Otherwise, she exchanges polite smiles and restrained gestures with people around her. The other nannies initially keep their distance. Louise’s manner—she plays the dignified governess, housekeeper, or English nurse—strikes them as haughty and affected. She also openly reprimands children who are unattended, snatch toys, or risk falling from a railing. Her conduct sets her apart from colleagues, even when her criticisms concern children’s safety.

The friendship with Wafa therefore occupies a small but important place in Louise’s social life. The two women are not presented as sharing every confidence. At the square, the nannies generally speak about themselves only indirectly, guarding stories of humiliation, separation, and loss. Louise’s reserve is understood rather than treated as an insult: the women have their own secrets and reasons for caution. Wafa’s discretion about Louise fits this shared code of limited disclosure.

The confidence about another child

Louise talks to Wafa about the child she imagines will be born into the Massé family. She anticipates the joy the baby would bring, as well as the extra work, and tells Wafa, « Avec trois enfants, ils ne pourront pas se passer de moi. » For Louise, the imagined child is at once a source of affection and a guarantee of continued employment: with three children, she believes, the family could not do without her.

This confidence gives the friendship a particular asymmetry. Louise tells Wafa something that exposes her own longing and her calculation of what the family’s future might mean for her, but the hope is directed toward a household that is not her own. Her fantasy of a wider life and purer love is bound to the practical fear that, when the children grow older, she will have nothing to do. Wafa is the listener to whom Louise can voice that hope; the evidence does not suggest that Wafa shares or endorses Louise’s expectation.

Discretion among domestic workers

At the square, the nannies form a loose community through repeated encounters after school, in supermarkets, at the pediatrician’s office, and at the neighborhood carousel. They learn one another’s names and employers, but their knowledge remains partial. Their conversations often turn to the habits of the families they work for, while personal histories emerge only by allusion. Some women conceal their real names; others carry painful memories of children they no longer see, money sent to relatives, or employers’ humiliations. Against this background, Wafa’s silence about Louise is not simply a failure of friendship. It belongs to a wider practice of protecting what cannot safely be made public.

Louise herself knows that Wafa has been discreet about her friend’s life. Other nannies are curious about the white nanny who seems so perfect to parents, who praise her cooking and total availability, and say that Myriam trusts her completely. They wonder where Louise worked before, whether she is married, whether she has children waiting at home, and whether her employers treat her fairly. Louise answers little or not at all. Wafa does not satisfy their curiosity on her behalf. The friendship thus exists alongside the collective scrutiny directed at Louise, but does not turn her into an open book.

Wafa’s account during the investigation

After the children’s murder, Captain Dorval summons Wafa to the police headquarters known as 36 and questions her. Wafa cries so much that at first she cannot get words out. Dorval grows impatient and tells her that she does not care about Wafa’s immigration papers, employment contract, Louise’s promises, or Wafa’s own naivety; she wants to know whether Wafa saw Louise that day. The interrogation places their friendship inside a harsher institutional setting, where Wafa’s circumstances and loyalties are treated as obstacles to extracting a precise answer.

Wafa recounts that she visited the apartment in the morning and rang the bell. Louise opened the door only partway. Wafa says Louise seemed to be hiding something. Before the conversation could go further, Alphonse slipped past Louise’s legs and ran to the children, who were still in their pajamas, sitting in front of the television. Wafa tried to persuade Louise to go out with her for a walk, saying the weather was fine and the children would be bored. Louise refused to let her in. Wafa called to Alphonse, who was disappointed, and then left with him.

That testimony establishes a brief encounter and a refusal, not an explanation. Wafa can say that Louise appeared guarded, that the children were inside, and that Louise would not accept the proposed outing. She cannot account for what happened after she left. Her account is consequently valuable but bounded: it offers Dorval a troubling detail about Louise’s behavior without resolving the central questions of where Louise went or what she did.

The limits of what friendship can reveal

Wafa’s account is one strand in Dorval’s reconstruction of the day. Rose Grinberg says she encountered Louise in the building’s hall about an hour before the murder, and police search the neighborhood, question local people, and repeatedly examine supermarket surveillance footage. The camera shows Louise moving calmly through the aisles while the children run around her; she takes milk, biscuits, and wine, and does not call after them. Against those later discoveries, Wafa’s recollection of the half-open door and Louise’s refusal to go for a walk becomes part of a pattern that Dorval is trying to understand.

The friendship does not give Wafa access to the secret Dorval seeks. Even the person Louise confided in about her imagined place in the Massé household can offer only the small, concrete facts of a morning visit. The contrast is stark: Louise had spoken to Wafa about a future in which the family could not do without her, while the investigation turns on a moment when Wafa was not allowed into the apartment. Their relationship remains real but limited, shaped by the guarded habits of the nannies and by the gap between closeness and knowledge. After Louise’s crime, that gap becomes consequential: Wafa can testify to an encounter, but cannot make the private world behind the closed door legible.