The story begins with an arrest. The police stormed an apartment early in the morning, with a couple still sleeping. The man is taken away, the woman suffers a weakness and has to be taken to hospital. Whoever is arrested there, the reader will not know. From then on, the story of a fatal encounter is told in flashbacks, which are repeatedly interrupted by the interrogation of the arrested man.
Repentance - the title of the story - is more a psychological narrative than a detective novel. There is a Commissioner, but he is hardly investigating. Much more important are the feelings and motifs of the people who meet so fatally and whose views are devoted to things in loose alternation chapter by chapter. None of them is without guilt, no one is just victims, no one has gotten into it. There is hardly any regret itself.
The summer winds blowing from France are warm and the evenings are mild. She likes to sit on the terrace - young, pretty and very lonely because her husband is far away. The young tenant, on the other hand, is unattached, a little naive and the most attractive bachelor in the village. In the beginning it's just a game she starts, provoked by her friends. She smiles at him a little bit more friendly than necessary, greets him warmly and invites him to her terrace. It doesn't stop there. They quickly take pleasure in each other. An affair develops, which the two cannot escape. It was not an irresistible attraction that brought them together. It was the charm of the forbidden. But once connected, their passion is great - and both lose control. She decides to confess everything to her husband. Is it already too late for the truth?