Jules frowned. She’d had a number of emails come in overnight. Post-completion matters. She glanced at her laptop and he followed her gaze.

‘It can wait,’ he said. He was copied into the same emails. He held out a hand, drawing her up out of bed, kissing her neck as she stood. ‘This can’t.’ He scooped her legs up and carried her, naked, over to the balcony where the sun was rising lazily, hazily, over the ocean.

‘Come on. You’ve got to greet the day. Start it right!’ His enthusiasm was contagious.

She slipped on her black bikini and a green silk kimono and they made their way to the beach.

‘Come on, put your hands up! Come and greet this beautiful day!’ he said, walking into the sea. Jules laughed, shaking her head, but followed him in, the water cool as it rose from her ankles to her calves. She put her hands up. With Paul by her side, she had begun walking into the sea with her arms open wide.

*

Her friends, of course, had noted the difference.

‘I’ve never seen you like this,’ enthused Alice, in an orange and blue maxi dress with a kente print and a navy chunky cardigan, sleeves pushed up as she laid the long dining table at Nina’s apartment for dinner, candlesticks, fine china and all. She felt a tug of longing for the first flush of love. She was in the midst of married-with-three-children-and-no-sleep love. The kind of love that brought you coffee in bed in the morning and closed the door so you could drink it in peace, rather than whisking you off to Miami for the weekend.

‘It suits you,’ agreed Nina, appraising the activity in the kitchen in wide-legged jeans, a cropped olive-green jumper and one of Sylvie’s silk scarves, a vivid tangerine, which she’d tied over her head, securing it with a knot. Still deeply committed to therapy, she had already probed Jules for details of Paul’s background to check for any red flags and had come up with none. Earlier, she’d bought a loin of lamb from the butcher, cubed it and marinated it in a za’atar rub with a twist: cinnamon. She’d been steaming it for hours, a technique she’d found in one of Sylvie’s old cookbooks. The aroma was wafting from the hob. Her favourite of Sylvie’s cookbooks was well thumbed, splashed with tiny sprays of oil and small smears of herbs. Some of the dishes she recognised Sylvie having made for her and she was working her way through it, as a labour of love. The Middle Eastern twists had begun to seep into the menu at La City Pâtisserie too and had been a big hit with customers. There was talk of Nina bringing out her own cookbook, a fusion of Middle Eastern flavours and patisserie, but she felt that would be quite a leap.

She’d volunteered to cook the main course; since Alice prepared meals for five people three times a day, it seemed fair that she be the one to pick out a cake from the pristine counters at Le Bon Marché and she’d chosen well; a gâteau Saint-Honoré, circles of puff pastry and cream, decadently surrounded by small baked profiteroles dipped in caramelised sugar.