‘You too,’ was all she said.

He glanced at her as they walked home. ‘I wanted to see you,’ he said. ‘To tell you in person about Alice and me.’

She nodded, afraid if she spoke her voice would squeak or tears would cascade down her cheeks. ‘It was unexpected,’ he said, as if by way of explanation, his tone awkward. ‘I’m so sorry about your father, Neen,’ he added, as though that were the cause of her sadness. Maybe he genuinely thought it was?

Nina nodded again, her eyes fixed ahead. Suddenly, Teddy stopped and reached for her. A gasp caught in her throat as he pulled her against his chest. She could feel the drum of his heart against her cheek, could smell his scent, which she thought she had forgotten but was as real and familiar to her as the night they had met and sat wrapped around each other outside Le Sacré Coeur. He gripped her a little too tight, his groin pressed a little too closely. The air around them felt charged, like someone turning on the power in a nightclub. She wished she’d told him how she felt. She would never be able to tell him now.

‘I’ve never had a friend like you before, Nina. Someone who’s understood me…’

Nina had a swift and startling vision of him in the bar after le Bal, the blue of his eyes as their faces drew nearer. She wanted to wind her hands around his neck, pull his lips to her own.

‘It works. When I’m with her family, with her brothers. I kind of fit, you know?’ Nina bit her lip. How many conversations had they had about feeling like they didn’t fit anywhere, the subtext that they fitted together, fused along the phone line, but he’d somehow found a better fit? Had she read it wrong all along? Was she just not enough? Had she imagined the pulse of connection between them?

Her hands were around Teddy’s waist now, wanting to push him away and hold him close all at once.

She turned her face away from his chest and realised that up ahead Alice had gone into the apartment building but Jules had stopped and was watching them. A frown passed over her face, the curves and contours forming a question mark.

Nina jerked away from Teddy, turned and ran a little way along the street, where she was sick in a bin. Wearing the T-shirt she’d slept in, baggy jeans, platform espadrilles and Jules’s blazer.

‘Les Anglais,’ an elderly woman muttered as she passed, and Nina had never felt less connected to her roots, to her blood, to her friends, to her favourite city. A part of her floated away.

4

Friday p.m.

Alice

Ah, Paris, thought Alice, as she almost tripped over a bijou-looking little dog on rue de Sèvres. She could have happily spent the afternoon taking in the view from Nina’s balcony, which overlooked Le Bon Marché department store on the corner and, beyond, the Eiffel Tower and the domed church of Les Invalides, and eating the remaining pastries from the train, but Nina had insisted they go out – ‘We need to feel Paris in our bones!’ – so they’d dropped their stuff off and were almost immediately outside, ogling, as they had always done, the bags and accessories on display in the windows of Le Bon Marché.