I get up and walk across the flat, the floorboards complaining noisily beneath me again. I pick up the little plastic phone by the door, and a female voice speaks.

‘Joyeux Noël! Are you ready to go?’

Chapter Twenty-Five

I am not, as it turns out, ready to go. In fact, I am nowhere near.

I am wearing only a hoodie and a pair of Queens Park Rangers pyjama bottoms. And my heart is suddenly hammering so hard I can feel it in my legs.

‘Joyeux Noël!’ I splutter into the intercom. And then: ‘Er … Can you just give me ten minutes?’

‘OK,’ she says. ‘I’ll be in that café across from the church.’

I open the wardrobe and start pulling on clothes, my chest clenched with the anticipation of what’s to come. What am I supposed to do here? It’s not like I can change what originally happened. So what is the point of coming back – just to remind me what might have been? To set me on a path I’ve often wished I could’ve explored further?

By the time I’m fully dressed, these questions are still pinballing around my brain, resolutely unanswered. I give my face a sizeable cold-water splash, and then sprint down the eight creaky flights of stairs. I shoulder-barge the huge courtyard door, and step out into the freezing fresh air. The Saint-Sulpice church bells are at it again, singing out into the clear blue sky, sending another flock of pigeons spiralling upwards towards the summit of the giant Christmas tree. The stark, cold sunlight bounces off the crunchy brown carpet of leaves on the ground. The whole square looks idyllic.

And then, across the street, sitting at an outside table sipping something warm, I spot her.

She’s wearing a long, stylish dark brown coat, and a scarf that’s almost completely obscured by her thick chin-length hair. It’s a blonde version of that bob Audrey Tautou had in Amélie, and it suddenly strikes me as perhaps the Frenchest hairstyle in existence.

The waiter approaches her and she smiles up at him. Dark eyebrows, dirty-blonde hair and deep-red lips: dramatic flashes of colour on her otherwise pale heart-shaped face.

For a second, I think about just turning and walking away. I don’t know what to do.

But then she spots me, and beckons me over, just like she did at Marek’s wedding. And before I know it, I’m at the table.

‘Hey, Alice.’

‘Hey!’

She stands and offers me her cheek to kiss. The scent of her perfume wraps itself around me like a flowery headlock. ‘Ça va?’ She nods behind me, at my apartment block. ‘Ben, I can’t believe you live right on the square. You know this is, like, one of the poshest parts of Paris?’

‘I know …’

‘How did you find this place?’