Isabelle D’Anjou

Isabelle D’Anjou is the cherished daughter of Georges D’Anjou and the wife of Roger Bolduc, whose disappearance turns her private marriage into the center of the D’Anjou family’s search for a missing cameo. At first she appears to be a frightened wife waiting for news; the fuller account reveals that she helped Roger steal the stone and is left to bear both the family’s suspicions and the burden of her own complicity. Her story traces how a concealed act, a confirmed death, and the cameo’s uncertain return shape a life caught between grief and secrecy.

Identity and Family Position

Isabelle is the daughter of Georges, a judge, and a member of the D’Anjou family. She has remained in her parents’ home while most of her siblings left early. Clémentine, the family’s longtime servant, cared for the children, but Isabelle was the one for whom her mother remained a mother. This distinction places Isabelle close to her parents while also making the possibility of disappointing or alienating them especially consequential. When the family learns that Roger may have taken the cameo, its attention turns to her, and the closeness that might have offered protection becomes another source of pressure.

She is also Roger’s wife, bound to a man whose departure leaves a gap that cannot initially be explained. In one early telephone call, Loïc reaches Isabelle at about four in the afternoon. She is pleased and surprised to hear from him, but sounds nervous and worried; she tells him Roger is away and then admits that she cannot reach him on his mobile phone. When Loïc asks where he has gone, she says Toronto. The call establishes the uncertainty surrounding Roger before his disappearance is publicly understood, and places Isabelle in the difficult position of speaking about his absence while concealing what she knows about his plans.

Roger’s Disappearance and Isabelle’s Complicity

After Roger’s absence becomes a family crisis, suspicion gathers around the missing cameo. When the possibility is raised that Roger left with it, the family looks again toward Isabelle. She has held herself together until then, but breaks down, insisting that she knows nothing about the affair and does not know how Roger could have taken it. She collapses in tears with her head in her hands, and her mother holds her. The scene is emotionally genuine, but it is not a complete account: Isabelle’s denial conceals a role she cannot yet admit.

The fuller truth is that Roger persuaded Isabelle that the cameo could make them rich. She obtained the combination to Georges’s safe from her mother through a stratagem, enabling Roger to take the stone. Isabelle later remembers the anniversary of Roger’s forty-second birthday, celebrated with champagne on the terrace of the inn La Goéliche on Île d’Orléans, two days before his New York trip. They had imagined cruises and stays on tropical islands, already spending in their minds the fortune they hoped to make. In the aftermath, she wonders whether Roger has taken the money and gone to enjoy those destinations alone. The remembered celebration sharpens the betrayal: the shared anticipation of a future becomes evidence of how readily Roger’s promise of partnership may have concealed a plan that benefited him alone.

The couple’s apparent financial circumstances deepen the uncertainty. Roger had suggested that the 2000 collapse of technology stocks had nearly ruined him, but he had maintained only modest bank accounts in Québec and hidden most of his money abroad, apparently to mislead the tax authorities and perhaps Isabelle as well. The family interprets the hidden wealth as a reason he might have fled to begin again elsewhere; some even suspect that his World Trade Center appointment was invented to misdirect them. Isabelle, meanwhile, knows that the story implicates her too. She cannot simply correct the family’s suspicions without confessing that she helped secure the safe combination.

Her dilemma has no easy route to confession. Her mother believes she never gave Isabelle the combination. Isabelle cannot tell her that she took it while her mother was drunk without risking both her mother’s and her father’s estrangement. Nor can she safely reveal her own part while the family continues to suspect her. The silence that protects her from immediate exposure also keeps her isolated inside the lie. Her guilt is not abstract: she knows what she did, knows that the family’s suspicions are not entirely misplaced, and cannot find the courage or moral strength to bring those facts together openly.

Addiction, Loss, and the Letter from New York

In autumn 2001, Isabelle’s existing tendency toward alcohol intensifies. Alcohol soon ceases to be enough, and she turns to cocaine. In early 2002 she nearly dies of an overdose and is sent to rehabilitation. Georges suspects that more than the disappearance of her husband is driving her collapse, but he does not know how to free his daughter from the weight of the crime. He is torn between his role as a father and his instincts as a judge, while the case also unsettles his approaching retirement and his future in the family law practice.

By June 2002, Isabelle receives an unexpected letter from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. It confirms through DNA testing that fragments of Roger’s bones were recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center complex. She has to reread the English letter as her heart races. It says nothing about the cameo. The news ends one uncertainty—Roger is dead—but leaves the object at the heart of the family’s conflict unaccounted for. The family had been forced to imagine him gone to the other side of the world or to the afterlife; now his remains connect his disappearance directly to the disaster, without resolving where the stolen stone went.

Isabelle has overcome her drug dependence, but she remains depressed and withdrawn. She takes long solitary walks on the Plains of Abraham, then spends much of the day in her room, using her laptop to distract herself from a morose isolation. Her parents bring her back to their home on Grande-Allée after the overdose so they can watch over her. Georges avoids forcing a confrontation, partly because she seems so fragile and partly because he cannot find a way to make an admission possible. His restraint does not erase the family’s secret; it leaves Isabelle living with it, even as Roger’s death removes the hope that he might return to explain himself.

Encounters with Loïc and the Cameo

Isabelle later takes the initiative to call Loïc and tell him that Roger’s remains have been identified. She remembers the dream he had described to her nine months earlier and recognizes its apparent telepathic accuracy concerning the events of September 11. Loïc is not surprised by Roger’s death, which he has long believed in, but he is disappointed that the cameo has not been found. He takes the absence of the jewel as a possible end to the family’s long-running disturbance, while withholding from Isabelle his own recent discoveries about the D’Anjou family’s origins because they raise further questions.

In March 2003, Loïc unexpectedly sees Isabelle dancing in a Varadero nightclub while he is on holiday with Laurence. Her auburn hair catches his attention before he recognizes her face. She appears to be enjoying herself and is with a young Cuban man. Loïc hesitates to approach: he does not want to intrude on her apparent new relationship or make Laurence uncomfortable by bringing an unknown cousin into their holiday. The encounter shows Isabelle in a strikingly different register from the withdrawn, depressed woman of the previous year, but it does not establish that her grief or guilt has disappeared.

Loïc sees her again at a Cuban religious ceremony. Isabelle wears a white headscarf and stands with the same young man. She has noticed Loïc, but turns her head; both cousins silently avoid acknowledging one another, sparing themselves an awkward meeting between couples. Their coincidental presence in Cuba takes on further significance because the cameo is nearby in Havana, though neither knows it. Isabelle’s repeated appearance links her, unwittingly, to the object and its journey even as she and Loïc choose not to speak.

Later, Isabelle calls Loïc with startling news: the cameo has been found in New York and has reached her in Québec, apparently intact despite the explosions, fire, and collapse of the towers. Its return overturns the apparent finality Loïc had drawn from the missing stone and Roger’s identified remains. The call places Isabelle once more between the family and the object whose theft she helped make possible. The evidence establishes that she has received it, but does not resolve every question about how it survived or how it came back into her possession.

Later Life and Narrative Significance

At a later funeral, Isabelle welcomes Loïc in a black suit. Her face and hair retain their beauty, but her eyes are shadowed with sadness. In less than a year she has lost both parents, and the family has endured damaging media coverage. Even amid this personal and public strain, she remembers to mention the novel she and Loïc have co-written. Published in Montréal and Paris, it has received appreciative reviews, especially in France, where it was prominently displayed at the Drugstore on the Champs-Élysées and praised for its originality and unconventional character. Her account offers a concrete sign of a life continuing beyond the crisis of Roger and the cameo: she has a creative partnership with Loïc and can speak of their shared work even at a family gathering marked by loss.

Isabelle’s defining conflict is the divide between what she can show and what she knows. Her tears when Roger is suspected do not make her innocent of the theft; her guilt, in turn, does not settle whether Roger abandoned her or died in the World Trade Center disaster. The novel keeps these pressures in view together: the loving plans she recalls, the secret assistance she gave, the addiction that followed, and the later return of the jewel. Isabelle is not simply the keeper of a family secret but one of its most exposed participants, caught between the wish to know what happened to Roger and the fear that truth will uncover her own part in the story.