No. That’s just what she needed. She needed to tell her friends what was going on. She needed to speak to them. Hadn’t she felt better when she confided in them last night? Wincing, she picked up her phone. There were no new message notifications on the home screen. She wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Did she want Mr Hough to reply? And if she did, what did she want him to say? I have a crush on you too Mrs Astor. Let’s do this! Or Thanks but no thanks? Maybe that’s the sort of response she needed to shut this childish fantasy down. Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? A fantasy? Or was it…

She tipped her head from side to side, as if she might slide the hangover out of her ears. It had been a long time since she’d felt this bad but Lordy, was it worth it, for a night like that. A night like that in Paris, with her best girlfriends. A melancholy had wrapped itself around her lately, as she moved towards forty, a feeling like her best days were behind her, but something else tugged at her today: she’d weathered the baby years, her children were all – at least for now – at school. She had friends, she and Ted were comfortable, and there were still nights like that. Was it possible she was at the beginning of something, rather than at the end?

Despite her throbbing head and the accompanying waves of nausea, she wanted to be with her friends; to regroup, laughing, over breakfast; to rehash the events of last night. And she wanted to tell them what had been going on with her, to expand on what she’d shared with them, her feelings of failure around motherhood. Her guts knotted at the memory of the confession, like she wasn’t sure if she had done something wrong, but hadn’t they embraced her wholeheartedly? Hadn’t they told her they understood, even though it was removed from their own experience, their own struggles? Warmth surged through her, melting the anxiety, briefly downgrading her hangover.

That’s odd, she thought when she emerged from her room. No Nina humming in the kitchen with freshly brewed coffee and pastries, no Jules tapping away next door, or on the L-shaped sofa in the lounge.

She glanced at the time: 8.30 a.m. Her phone was almost out of battery. She didn’t want to creep into Jules’s room for the charger and wake her. She tossed it on to the sofa and made herself a cup of tea. It steamed lazily as she stood by the shutters, the cool, crisp air medicinal. Her friends were asleep and a sun-dappled day in Paris was unfolding below. Suddenly, she didn’t want to miss a single minute of it. She showered quickly, removing the traces of last night – cigarette smoke in her hair, stale sweet sweat from dancing on her skin – and threw on her favourite voluminous floral dress and her white canvas trainers. By the time she was ready her phone had died, but the thought of being without it for a few hours only made her more eager to get going.