Their eyes were shining, glossed with tears from laughing. They were connected by these cobbles, these balconies, and a language they all loved but despite their best efforts could never quite master.

After dinner they picked up their glasses and stood by the glass-edged terrace, Paris laid out before them: Sacré Coeur, Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower.

The city of love, Nina thought, her eyes alighting on Le Sacré Coeur. She felt a knuckle of pain in her chest. The contrast with the warm depths of her friendship with Alice and Jules and the weight of the decision she had to make. When had it become a decision, she wondered, and not a fait accompli? As she gazed over the city, studded with lights from towers and apartment blocks, feelings she had discussed in therapy, trauma she had processed and filed away, were resurfacing. Guilt was hovering; in her thoughts, in her heart. It was a long while ago, she reminded herself. You were a different person then. You’ve worked through it, you’ve moved on, you’re out the other side. Her therapist would almost certainly attribute this rush of feelings to the tiny cluster of cells in her uterus. Could she make it work? she wondered. Could she have a baby and raise it alone? She didn’t feel compelled to; not in the way she felt compelled to bake and create and to drive her business forward. To travel, to spend time with her friends, to spend weekends exploring markets in foreign places. That to her was what life was about. Nights like this. And she couldn’t have a baby unless she was totally committed to it, to giving it the best life possible. That’s what every baby deserves, she thought, and her father, Samir, flickered in her mind. He hadn’t wanted a baby, had he, and she’d spent her life rebounding from that? From his mistake. What was a blessing to Joanie had been a mistake to him. But she was here, wasn’t she? She was here in Paris with her friends. She had a full life. She had a good life. Parents didn’t need to be perfect. They just needed to show up. Surely she could do a better job than Samir? The conflict of her decision left her breathless.

It’s not a baby yet, she reminded herself. It’s a small cluster of cells. No point in attaching romantic notions to it. She wondered how many weeks pregnant she was. She had purposely not inputted the date of her last period into the calculator she’d seen on the NHS website. She had a vague idea – around a month – but she didn’t want a precise number of weeks, to track against the links to detailed growth charts she’d seen online. She remembered a religious education lesson in her Catholic school, recalled being surprised at how early a foetus had a detectable heartbeat. There was no need to get caught up in detail like that until she’d decided what she was going to do.