‘You are dazzling,’ Teddy whispered into Nina’s ear a short while later, looping his arms around her and gently spinning her round. In a shadowy corner of the dance floor, he kissed her, his hand on her neck, eliciting shocks of stardust down her spine, and their bodies pressed together, magnetic. Nina felt suddenly grateful to her movie-star father for inviting her to Paris.

*

By 1 a.m. they were all at Valentin’s flat in Montmartre. Julia and Valentin were in his bedroom, snogging, and Alice, not used to drinking, had fallen asleep in his small sitting room.

‘I want to show you my favourite place in Paris,’ Teddy whispered to Nina. Since leaving the bar they had sobered, grown awkward around each other with Julia and Alice close by. It occurred to Nina that the others didn’t know they had kissed, even.

‘We shouldn’t leave Alice.’

‘We won’t be long and she’s soundo. Jules seems pretty happy in there.’ He gestured in the direction of Valentin’s bedroom door and grinned. The cold air hit them afresh as they stepped outside and Teddy raced back up to the apartment, returning with a blanket. He wrapped it over both their shoulders, securing it in place with his left hand and holding Nina’s hand with his right. They navigated cobbled streets, laughing when Nina’s heels got stuck, pressed side by side for warmth. ‘I come here whenever I’m in Paris,’ Teddy said, pulling Nina up an uneven flight of stairs.

By 3 a.m., Nina was sitting on the top of the steps outside Le Sacré Coeur with Teddy and he had shared with her how both his parents had died when he was young, in a house fire. How they’d managed to bundle him in a blanket and pass him through a small top window to a neighbour. How difficult it had been since. How in every city he visited he would find a church and light a votive candle for them both, the only way he could think for them to still travel together. At some stage he’d abruptly changed the subject and made a joke, and they were drunk enough for their conversation to snap like elastic on to lighter matters. Soon they were shooting lines from their favourite films back at each other. She laid her head on his shoulder and he wrapped his arms, and the blanket, around her. It was almost freezing, but beer and lust kept them warm.

By 5 a.m., they returned to Valentin’s flat to retrieve Jules and Alice and the four of them wandered through the streets of Paris back to Le Crillon, singing ‘Disco 2000’, swapping stories and promising each other – swearing on the Bow Tie of Fun, which Julia was swinging around her head – that they would do this every year. They would meet back in Paris. (And they would get matching dolphin tattoos – even Teddy.)

‘Let’s meet here! At the fountains!’ they whooped as they reached Place de la Concorde; pointing at the huge Fontaine des Fleuves, illuminated arcs of water creating crescent-moons of gold, lambent droplets falling like shooting stars over the tritons and mermaids; swinging from lamp posts as they passed them, feeling like every movie, every moment, was seeping into their skin. This was their city. This is where it felt like their lives had finally begun.