‘Everything okay?’ Nina asked, as Alice checked her phone and frowned.

Alice blushed red. ‘Yeah, I was just waiting for an update from one of Charlotte’s teachers. I thought he might send it by the end of the day.’ She shoved her phone back in her bag.

A blast of cold air signalled they were almost at the top of the escalator. They were propelled upwards, closer towards a ceiling of stars. Nina couldn’t help a silent, inner squeal. The beauty of Paris always got her.

*

Nina was careful to accept wine but to drink it very slowly, reminding her friends if questioned that it irritated her IBS. She made her meal choices with gusto – Grilled chicken with rice! Delicious! – although they were usually the very last thing she would have chosen to order. It felt like a punishment. A punishment for falling pregnant. But we used a condom! she wanted to scream at the sky as Jules knocked back another beading glass of champagne while she munched on a piece of asparagus, the hollandaise sauce discreetly scraped off. Old Nina, pre-therapy, would have believed this were a punishment, she thought, and she was grateful to have moved on, even if a tiny little voice was occasionally whispering, maybe Old Nina was right.

The night passed in a blaze of chatter:

‘Neen, whatever happened to that fit Finnish guy you were seeing?’

‘Yes! The Viking! I liked him!’

‘So did I, but he totally ghosted me after, like, our fifth date.’

‘What does ghosted mean?’

‘He just cut off contact. Dead like a ghost. I never heard from him again.’

‘That’s a shame. Hey, did you hear about––’

‘No! Really? Although, I did always think––’

‘––Before they were married apparently. But why go through with it?’

They buried themselves willingly in their pasts: in shared jokes, and wardrobe malfunctions, and stupid things they wished they hadn’t done at the time but now wished they could do all over again. As they did, memories of hot, sticky bars and heart-broken confessionals on dirty pavements weaved around them, as it had so many times. It was like wrapping their arms around each other as they braced themselves for a long walk home in heels. They were back in their Paris bubble. Nina felt the relief of it acutely.

‘That woman on the bakery counter always hated you,’ Jules was laughing.

‘I know! And every time I asked her for a demi-baguette classique, she would reply in English.’ Nina gritted her teeth in mock angst. ‘I always wanted to say, I’m French! Half of me is, at least.’

‘All you’d have got is a “bof?”,’ grinned Alice, and they did the thing they did when pretending to be a disinterested French person. Bof, she repeated, shrugging her shoulders, Nina and Jules laughing too and also shrugging.

Their waiter returned at that moment, clocking the bof and scanning them all for signs of whether he was the source of their mirth. ‘Plus de vin?’ he asked suspiciously, the three of them roaring with laughter as he walked away to retrieve it.