It was four days earlier that I’d bumped into her. I was sitting outside another café in the Marais, trying to cure my crippling writer’s block by taking my laptop out of the apartment for once. But all I could focus on were the irritated glares the waiter was throwing me, possibly due to the fact that I’d only ordered one small coffee in four hours. I was on the brink of calling it a day, snapping my MacBook shut and heading home, when I heard a familiar voice from across the street.

‘No way … Ben!’

I looked over, and there she was. Alice from uni.

I hadn’t seen her since we’d left York in 2008. We’d been so close during that first term, but once I started seeing Daphne, we’d gradually drifted further and further apart. By third year, we would barely even exchange a nod if we passed each other on campus.

But the truth is: I still thought about her. As the years passed, I checked in on her Facebook from time to time – which was pretty pointless, really, as she barely ever posted. I’d seen she was working for some big-time marketing company, but she hadn’t mentioned anything online about living in Paris. So when I saw her across that street, grinning from ear to ear and looking even hotter than I remembered, the shock quickly gave way to heart-pounding excitement.

I guess it was partly because I was having such an awful time at that point. I was missing Daphne like mad and getting zero work done, in a city where I knew literally no one. I was lonely and confused and miserable, and suddenly here was a friendly face I hadn’t seen in years.

The odds of randomly bumping into her must have been millions to one. It felt like fate.

It still does.

The waiter approaches our table, tapping his notepad with a pencil.

‘Bonjour, monsieur. Qu’est-ce que vous voudriez?’

I clear my throat and decide to have a go at wheeling out my rusty French. ‘Oui, bonjour. Er, je voudrais un chocolat chaud aussi, s’il vous plaît.’

He smirks and rolls his eyes. ‘Do you want whipped cream?’

‘Non, pas pour moi,’ I say, refusing to cave in.

‘What about marshmallows?’

‘Non, pas de …’ I look at Alice.

‘Guimauves,’ she says, smiling.

‘Pas de guimauves pour moi,’ I tell the waiter firmly.

‘OK, one hot chocolate, no whipped cream, no marshmallows, coming up.’

‘What am I doing wrong?’ I ask as he walks away. ‘No matter how hard I try, they always reply in English.’

‘Your accent’s a giveaway,’ Alice says. ‘Even when you speak French, you still sound like Hugh Grant.’

‘How come you’ve nailed it so perfectly? You sound like Thierry Henry.’

She laughs and her Amélie hair bounces gently above her shoulders. ‘Merci beaucoup. Je vais prendre ça comme un compliment.’