The revelation of Loïc’s stillborn twin turns a family wake into the belated disclosure of a birth, a death, and a secret kept for decades. On the final evening of Guillaume D’Anjou’s vigil, the doctor who had delivered Loïc returns to speak of what he had carried on his conscience since the birth. What follows joins medical error and remorse to a second, more disturbing discovery: the twin’s body had been found inside their mother’s grave.

The doctor’s confession

Pierre Saindon arrives at the wake richly dressed, with a fine moustache and silver at his temples. Some of those present recognize him immediately. He had delivered Loïc from his dying mother, then left Touladi less than a year after the tragic birth to practise in the Québec region. After exchanging greetings, he draws Loïc aside, visibly struggling with emotion, and tells him that there had been another fetus in his mother’s womb.

The doctor says he had sensed the second child while trying to stem the hemorrhage, but recognized that it was already dead. He chose not to tell the family, believing that another loss would only deepen their grief. The admission is therefore not simply news of a twin: it exposes a silence maintained by someone who had been present at Loïc’s birth and had spent years regretting both what he concealed and what he could not prevent.

Loïc asks whether the doctor knows the fetus’s sex. Saindon does not. Before he can say more, Alexandre D’Anjou, who has quietly come within earshot, answers that the child was a girl. The revelation now has two witnesses and two moments of discovery: the doctor’s recognition during the delivery, and the family’s later finding in the cemetery.

The discovery in the grave

Alexandre explains that during the cemetery’s definitive rearrangement in 1947, several graves were opened, including that of Loïc’s mother. She was still remarkably well preserved. Alexandre had been there with Guillaume D’Anjou; Alcide Bolduc could not remain for long. They noticed an unusual swelling low on the dead woman’s abdomen and then found a tiny, withered body, nearly skeletal, between her legs, still attached by a dried umbilical cord.

The men were in tears. They could establish that the infant was a girl, but at the time could not understand how she had come to be outside the womb, much less why the doctor had not told them about her. Alexandre’s account gives physical form to the fact Saindon had withheld. The sister was not merely an undisclosed pregnancy or an absent child: her body had remained with her mother in the grave until the cemetery was moved.

Remorse and explanation

Saindon explains that the hemorrhage had carried the fetus downward while he tried to control the bleeding. By the time he realized what had happened, it was too late; he says he was able to feel enough to know that the child was dead. He admits that he could have disclosed the truth later, and that he reproached himself for not doing so. He also blames himself for failing to save Loïc’s young mother and wonders whether administering chloroform was a mistake.

The confession connects his departure from the village with his guilt. He says he left six months after the birth, fleeing his remorse and culpability, and that he was then sinking into alcoholism. His account does not undo the concealment; it reveals its cost to him and confirms that the family’s ignorance was prolonged by a decision he continued to regret. The medical explanation for the body’s appearance comes only after Loïc asks how a fetus could have left the womb in the grave. Saindon identifies the rare process as coffin birth, or postmortem fetal extrusion: gases accumulating in the mother’s body can push the fetus out of the uterus after death.

Loïc’s response and the event’s significance

Loïc is outwardly stunned, but inwardly the news gathers scattered pieces of his experience. He connects the existence of his sister with distant sensations, intuitions, and unexplained phenomena from his childhood. He does not tell the doctor that he has often felt a presence around him, or even within him; instead, he turns to the concrete question of how the body could have moved. The scene leaves that childhood sense of presence as a personal connection, not as proof of a supernatural explanation.

His first reproach is directed toward Guillaume, who had not told him. Alexandre explains that Guillaume was waiting until Loïc was old enough to absorb the shock and may not have felt able to tell him. Loïc accepts that there is now nothing to blame Guillaume for. The disclosure therefore brings not only a newly named sister but also an answer to the question of why the adoptive father had kept silent.

After the last vigil ends, Loïc says a short prayer with Marie-Louise D’Anjou and her two daughters, then goes to the room still reserved for him. He cannot sleep. As his awareness fades into pre-dream visions, he imagines himself expelled from the womb like someone thrown from a wrecked car, while his twin remains trapped inside, a part of himself imprisoned in the fatal shell. The image recalls an earlier, haunting vision of a child buried alive and turning in its grave. The revelation thus changes Loïc’s understanding of his birth while giving shape to the sense of incompleteness he had carried without knowing its source.