Now she was here, though, she was relieved. She hadn’t realised how much she needed a break. Although whether it would be a break was debatable. She was under strict instructions from Alice’s mother, Clemency, to go straight to the hotel to help with the wedding preparations.

She hoped there wouldn’t be too much to do as she was desperate to spend some time with Nina. Alongside her work and her father’s health, she had this consistent worry about Nina, nudging away at her. Should she be doing more to help Nina? The death of her grandmother, Sylvie, had hit her hard, and her career in music was faltering. She had built up a big following on Myspace, but promoting herself as a serious musician proved impossible while her father, Samir, kept becoming embroiled in tabloid scandals – and eventually Life in general and love in particular, her album, the thing she seemed to have all her hopes and dreams pinned on, had flopped.

Each time Jules had seen her in London recently, she seemed to have deteriorated further, and at Alice’s hen do she’d been in a terrible state, drinking at least three bottles of Prosecco at the spa and passing out before dinner. At least there weren’t any men there.

For Nina, the Samir debacle had become a sort of repertoire, a verbal vomit she expelled whenever she met someone new. Especially if it was a man she liked: ‘Well, my dad’s pretty famous, you might have heard of him, Samir Laurent? Yes, that’s the one. Well. He pissed off when he heard my mum was pregnant, then he sent me a beautiful note when I was sixteen, apologised for everything and invited me to a fancy ball to show me off. And then he told me he’d help me become a star – ha! – but turns out he just needed some PR points because he was sleazing on his co-star and then, when that didn’t work – oh yeah? You saw it in the papers? Me too! – he pissed off again. It’s a really lovely story!’ she would usually end it, downing whatever drink she had in her hand just to punctuate how jolly she found the whole thing! It was like she had to lay bare her whole family history in a take-me-or-leave-me fashion, the very antithesis to how Jules preferred to operate. Jules would try to take her politely to one side as she shrieked: ‘It’s. So. Fucking. Funny! Isn’t it?! Isn’t it????’

God knew what would happen at the wedding.

*

Nina had managed to delicately swerve being at the beck and call of Alice’s mother today by reminding her that she needed to undertake her own preparations: sorting out, and deciding what to do about, her grandmother’s apartment. It had been a huge shock, her grandmother leaving her the apartment, not just for her but for Samir too, who was furious. She hadn’t heard from him since. The loose plan was she would declutter it and let it out while she decided what to do. Jules had suggested listing it on a new website she’d heard about where you rent out your own place for short breaks. It would give Nina the flexibility to stay there when she visited Paris and she’d still earn some money from it.