Unable to deal with it personally, Gabriela had handed the task of clearing her mother’s house to a company in the West Country which Tom had found – recommended through a friend of a friend. She had visited just once, refusing his offer to accompany her, and collected a single box of photo albums and books before renting the place out through a local estate agent. She had always hated that house – or rather what it represented: the choice her mother had made to move out of London; her decision to abandon her only child wrapped up in the guise of selflessness, a refusal to uproot her at such a pivotal time in her life. I couldn’t do that to her, she would overhear her mother tell her friends. Not that she’d ever asked Gabriela if she’d wanted to stay.

‘So you were abroad when your mum …’ Tom mustered the courage to ask one night as they sat at his table, poring over papers.

‘How do you know that?’ Gabriela asked.

‘Saoirse mentioned it. Sorry, if you don’t want to talk about it—’

‘It’s fine,’ she cut in. ‘I was in Paris, finishing off my placement.’ She swallowed as she formed the words, her gaze held steadfast to the page.

Paris had pulled her in like the warm embrace she longed for, that year at the Sorbonne. Arriving in the July and staying until the following summer, with intermittent trips back to London, wafting between her tiny apartment above the bric-a-brac store on the Rue Galande and the university. With every step, she felt herself becoming someone new: the sort of person who sat in the grounds of the Greek church overlooking Notre Dame, sketching the spires that rose above the scaffolding; the sort of person who would go to the cinema at the end of her street, alone, to watch art-house films; the sort of person she and Saoirse would have called a cunt. But Saoirse wasn’t there and she was, and for as long as her sojourn lasted, London, and everything that it entailed, simply didn’t exist. And for that, she could not have been more grateful.

Within a couple of weeks in the city, Gabriela found a job at one of the cafés on the Place de la Sorbonne, serving overpriced coffee and stale croissants to tourists and overworked professors; the convenience of the location made up for the pitiful wage and the wandering hands of the maître d’. It was here that she met Pierre, as genuinely pretentious as the version of herself she had created, but so good-looking and so French, his opinion of himself so robust that it was difficult not to believe he was the god his body language told you he was.