“We looked like two drops of water. She was my mirror. She bore my character and I hers. We had no secrets from each other. I was her intimate book and she was mine. She’s the love of my life, half of my life. 13 and a half years is a short time…”
From Audrey’s first words, we know. We know that the pure and simple words of this 20-year-old girl will take us far away, to a region known only to her. Audrey will share a grief that few people can imagine: on July 14, 2016, her twin, Laura, was crushed by the crazy truck of the attack on the Promenade des Anglais. The two sisters were 13 years old. Since that day, she learns to live alone.
Audrey had arranged to meet us, in a way. The previous week, the young woman had not come to testify at the same time as her parents, her brother and her big sister at the trial of the Nice attack. Tuesday, September 27, watching her anchor herself with both hands in the witness box, looking straight, we understood why. She wanted to come alone, to stand in front of us, to show us that she had not disappeared in this unfathomable mourning which destroyed her family. Before the special assize court in Paris, Audrey came to say that she existed and that if her sister still lived in her, she was not the ghost of the deceased twin that her parents sometimes saw pass on her face.
From her first words, Audrey’s eyes misted up, her throats closed and silence fell. Throughout her testimony, the young woman marked long breaths, gasped for breath between two sobs, sometimes raising her clear gaze far, far away, well beyond the walls of the assize court. Audrey is now a cosmetics sales consultant: she followed the dream of the two young sisters to open a hair salon when they were older and which died out on July 14, 2016.
“I didn’t feel it anymore”
That evening, Audrey, Laura, their parents and friends were walking up the Promenade des Anglais after the fireworks to go home. Audrey was walking with a friend, Laura was right behind with her mother. “The last image I have of her is my sister arm in arm with my mother telling each other that they loved each other. I was happy, because the day before they had argued… I was the first to see the truck. I hear these cries, they have been ringing in my head for six years. This crowd coming towards us and this truck speeding by, all lights off. In the seconds that followed, I felt the wind of this scrap metal resonating, this truck accelerating, and I no longer saw my sister, my mother, or my father…”
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