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Stephen was up by then and dressed as always in a crisp shirt, sweater, and gray flannels. Ready for a board meeting, should one arise.

“Still finding monkeys?” he asked Reine-Marie, after getting a mug of coffee.

She was now sitting by the woodstove at the far end of the kitchen and bending over a large cardboard box. “Oui.”

“What’s the count?” he asked, joining her.

“Fifty-seven, so far.”

“What a weird person, collecting monkeys,” said Stephen, cradling Gracie, his ratmunk.

“Wish I could say it’s the strangest thing I’ve found going through people’s things.”

Having risen to chief archivist in Québec, Reine-Marie had recently decided to retire and take on consulting work.

This was a commission from a local family to go through their mother’s things. The matriarch had recently died, leaving them far less wealth than expected, a rambling old house, and boxes and boxes of clothes, papers, knickknacks, and a completely unexpected collection of monkey dolls, monkey postcards, stuffed, painted, and illustrated monkeys. All in boxes in the attic.

Though by far the largest collection of monkeys were hand-drawn on all sorts of documents.

It was a puzzle, and one Reine-Marie hoped to solve.

“Any of them valuable?” asked the old financier.

“Not that I know of,” she said, holding a moth-eaten monkey doll by an ear.

Armand had joined them, carrying a dossier.

“All right,” said Reine-Marie. “Before you lose yourself in work, what did that look between you and Jean-Guy mean, when we were talking about Haniya Daoud?”

“It’s just that if Annie and Roslyn are expecting a saint, they’re going to be disappointed.”

“Why? What’s she like?”

When he didn’t answer, her eyes grew serious and she understood.

“It’s a miracle she survived at all,” said Reine-Marie, “and that she turned her own pain into doing so much good. Not surprising she’d be . . .” What was the right word? “Difficult.”

“Oui,” said Armand. “And then some. Certainly wounded, maybe even unbalanced, in that she sees quite clearly what’s wrong with the world but can’t seem to see what’s right.”

Though Haniya Daoud had certainly seen into him. If not his head, then she’d seen through the cracks, into his broken heart.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Armand wondered if Florence understood that line from The Little Prince.

He hadn’t, as a child. It was only as he got older that he knew it to be true. And now he thought about Haniya Daoud, and what she had seen. With her own broken heart.

“An Asshole Saint,” said Stephen. “Not the first. I think most were, weren’t they? In fact, she wouldn’t even be the first around here.”

“You’re not talking about yourself, are you, Stephen?” asked Reine-Marie. “Because, at least according to Ruth, only one of those words applies to you.”

“Really? You’d take the word of a madwoman who carries around a duck? Treats that thing like it’s her child, isn’t that right, Gracie?” He kissed the ratmunk on her whiskered nose.

But both Reine-Marie and Armand knew who Stephen meant. Their resident Asshole Saint lived in a cabin in the woods, preferring his own company to that of anyone else on earth.

Everyone else on earth felt the same way.

They’d grown so used to calling him that, and he even introduced himself as the Asshole Saint, that the villagers had almost forgotten who he really was.