She heard Jules’s bedroom door close and bolted to her room, dressing quickly in jeans, boots and a pale grey sweater, and throwing things into her small case.

She deliberated outside Alice’s door. Alice would help her, but she wouldn’t understand the riot of Nina’s emotions; the acute sense of reckoning throbbing in her ears, as though she’d brought this on herself.

It was a quick and easy decision she had made, in this apartment, thirteen years ago. After Alice and Ted’s wedding she’d stayed on in Paris, to avoid her friends and to get the apartment ready to let so that once she left, she didn’t have to return. She couldn’t imagine ever wanting to be within its walls again. It reminded her of her betrayal of Alice, her night with Ted and the baby she didn’t want. It reminded her of a pregnancy test, taken at the end of that month, delivering a devastating result. Nina had never wanted a baby. When she pictured her future, it simply didn’t have a baby in it. She didn’t know why, and perhaps there was no reason; perhaps, as she was beginning to suspect, there didn’t need to be a reason. Maybe Samir felt the same. Maybe it was one of the few things that united them.

The problem, thirteen years ago, was she didn’t see anything in her future at all. She was pregnant by her best friend’s husband. And her best friend was pregnant too. While Alice was in London excitedly telling her parents, Nina was alone on this floor, laptop beside her, googling abortion clinics. She remembered the realisation dawning. She couldn’t carry on living that way. Car-crashing through life. Making one bad mistake after another – wrecking her career, her friendships, her relationships.

That month changed her life. That day in particular. She had stepped out into the bright sun, dazed by her news, on autopilot to her refuge, the one place that filled her with a sense of calm: the patisserie section of La Grande Épicerie.

Plus ça change, she had thought as she entered, filled with self-loathing, her eyes gliding over the trays of their signature Opera cakes, the chocolate hard and shiny, wishing she were here to collect something to bring to Sylvie. Later, when she was back in London, recovering at home, fearful of Joanie discovering her secret, reliving those awful days, her mind kept settling on that moment and she wondered whether the answer had been in front of her all along.

She closed the door quietly behind her and descended the stairs. She placed her keys in the key lock downstairs and hoped Jules and Alice remembered to do the same later. She should text them but she didn’t know what to say. Outside, the streets were quiet as she made a lonely pilgrimage to the metro. Twice she had found herself pregnant and in Paris. But things were different this time. She had been starting to think that perhaps she did want to keep this baby; perhaps she could see a future in which a part of her – and a part of Flynn – had been replicated in a child. It hadn’t happened too often that she would see Charlotte and wonder how her own child with Ted would have been, growing alongside her, but it had happened. She had everything she needed to raise a child: she was independent, financially stable and the father was a good man. But now, as quickly as the idea had been planted, it was being taken away.