Teddy’s never mentioned that, thought Nina. He’d said sometimes friends were coming down to visit at the weekend, but had never mentioned Alice’s name among them. But who cared? He was coming to see her! Perhaps she wouldn’t tell Alice just yet, perhaps she would wait until Teddy arrived. They could tell Alice and Jules together. Lemon basil ice cream had never tasted so good.

*

Jules arrived late to the bar that night, a cavernous brick room with low arched ceilings and cheap beer, enthralled by her new life in the City. Nina had never met anyone before who loved their job – or working – so much. It was like her first love; she wanted to speak of nothing else: how amazing the client lunches were, how swanky the offices were, how good the subsidised canteen was. It was like she’d joined a cult. Nina tried to look interested while she gulped down beer, feeling like a child playing at being a grown-up. The first time she’d met Jules and Alice, she’d felt like her life was finally beginning; she’d been swept up in that night, in a friendship with the only two women who could understand what that first trip to Paris was like for her: meeting, and quickly being rejected by, Samir. But lately it felt like their lives were marching on and hers was at a standstill. She was so close to things changing for the better and yet it felt so far.

She was quite merrily drunk and wending her way back across the dance floor when she saw Teddy, for the first time in six months. He looked tanned and relaxed, life in Aix clearly suiting him; his smile was broader, easier. He was leaning in to speak to Alice, and Nina felt a clutch of nausea as the feelings she had tried to downplay all these years crashed in her heart. The loud dance music flooded her ears as she walked towards them, bubbles of love rising up to the surface of her skin. She felt soapy and liquid. He looked up and caught her eye, as though he could sense her watching him, and his smile matched her own. Her heart hammered in her chest.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked wondrously, as though she hadn’t known he was coming at all. When she knew. Deep down she knew. He had come for her.

‘I came to see you,’ he said, his words mirroring her thoughts. He reached down and squeezed her into a hug, lifting her in the air as Jules laughed and Nina squealed and Alice shouted ‘Shots! Shots! Shots!’ before exploding into her favourite dance move: Le Tour Eiffel. Teddy set her down and Nina doubled over laughing, her arms finding her friends in a loose embrace.

The rest of the night passed in a blur. Nina tried to find a moment to be alone with Teddy, needing to just stand beside him, feel the electricity of their connection buzzing between them, but she was always being thwarted, by him dancing with someone else, or Jules telling her the difference between a stock and a bond. Nina looked over her head for Teddy, or Alice, and seeing neither instead grabbed a random passer-by to yell, ‘I fucking love this song! Do you?’ And the night sped up and the fractions of time became harder to grasp as her head started to swell with the heat from sweet, sickly shots, washed down with lukewarm beer. She could taste salt, her lips dry. There was a stranger’s hand around her waist. This was usually the feeling she craved, her brain growing fuzzy, like being wrapped in cotton wool, pushing out her conscious thoughts, the hard edges of disappointment – a stumble into a table, a skid across the wet floor – softened. She’d discovered in London that it was easier this way. Easier to exist when for a few hours there was no Teddy and no Samir Laurent and no broken dreams. But Teddy’s here tonight, she remembered, looking around, but again she couldn’t find him. A rough palm slid under the back of her knickers, squeezed her bum.