‘Nina,’ Jules said, ‘Alice is pregnant.’

8

Saturday p.m.

Nina

‘What the fuck is going on with Jules?’ Nina whispered to Alice back at the apartment. She had put a shirt on, open over her vest top, and it billowed theatrically as she gesticulated. Alice was looking equally aghast, both by Jules’s behaviour and Nina’s current outburst. She’d grown used to Nina’s calm and centred demeanour and wasn’t prepared for this change. ‘She fell asleep on the boat! What the fuck? We’re in Paris!’ she said, as if it were a very affront to Paris. ‘Motherhood, or the pursuit of motherhood rather,’ she blustered, gesturing at Alice as if to say ‘I don’t mean you’, but Alice took it that way anyway, ‘makes women crazy!’ Which was ironic, Alice thought, since she was the only one of them who was a mother and she was acting the least crazy right now.

‘I know, right?’ she said awkwardly. The weekend wasn’t working out how she’d envisaged and she pondered why she wasn’t wandering around an art gallery right now, finding some peace in this busy city and thinking about her own life and what she was going to do. She glanced towards the bedroom door, where Jules had crashed out a while ago. She’d slid between being asleep and awake on the boat, as if she’d been drugged, and when the trip finished they’d had to help her off and into a taxi and take her back to the apartment. She was fully clothed, in an oyster cashmere sweater, black cigarette pants and her Chanel ballet flats, lying on her back and snoring.

‘Do you think she has a secret drinking problem?’ Nina asked. ‘Something’s going on, that’s for sure. I didn’t want to say anything, but I saw a weird text from Paul on her phone yesterday. Something about not being able to ignore something. She snatched her phone up so I couldn’t see it properly.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Alice gulped. ‘When would she have been drinking this morning, though? Hang on a minute…’ She crept into Jules’s room, returning with her bag, withdrew a bottle of water and sniffed it. ‘Definitely water,’ she said. ‘But this is odd…’ she added, putting the bottle back and extricating two phones from Jules’s bag. ‘Do you think she’s having an affair?’ she asked.

‘No way,’ Nina said. ‘She’d never do that.’ But then the thought flashed in her head: sometimes good people do bad things. Hadn’t she herself done the same? ‘I’m sure I’ve heard her mention having a different phone for work. To keep things separate,’ she mused.

Alice replaced Jules’s bag, careful not to wake her. As she returned Nina’s phone flashed with a message and both women started at the sight of the sender: Paul.

‘Dammit,’ muttered Nina, opening the message and reading aloud. ‘“Hey Nina, just checking in, I’ve not been able to get hold of Jules. Is everything okay?” That’s strange, isn’t it? She’s only been away since yesterday.’