“Have you told him you’re leaving the country in about a month?” Valérie asked. We were sitting in the depths of a restaurant down the street from where we worked. A trellis of beams overhead featured silk vines, magenta flowers, and realistic birds in their nests. The place served a fantastic array of salads and drew a midday mob. I loathed American salads with a passion, but the things this restaurant produced were in no way similar. My favorite was chicken, avocado, palm hearts, and sweet corn on a bed of water-cress. This meal could be finished off with the second best cup of hot chocolate in Paris, thick as heavy cream, dark as the real chocolate that was melted into it, and spiced with cinnamon. The owner—an eager, bitter little old woman with tight, scanty curls who dressed like Red Riding Hood’s grandmother—stopped by with our pots of chocolate and more water.

“The first thing I said.” I sipped my chocolate and closed my eyes a second on the lushness, breathing in chocolate and cinnamon. “When I was trying not to fall into something nasty in that toilet, I wrote, ‘Do you, the most gorgeous man in Paris, want to go to a party with this clumsy, ordinary American? But don’t break your heart over me, I’m about to leave the country.’ Never say I’m not lacking in presumption.”

“You could have told him since,” Valérie reproved.

“When? A few days ago, we barely even knew each other.”

“She does have to tell him,” Giulia agreed with Valérie. “You’re right.”

“You act like he’ll be traumatized when I leave,” I protested. I wished we didn’t have to keep talking about me leaving all the time. I’d been looking forward to it—Prague, Cambridge—and now it made my stomach feel all funny. “Do you honestly think someone that cute could fall for me?”

“Yes,” Valérie said firmly. Valérie is a nice friend. “Which is why you have to warn him off.”

Damn it.

“I’ll tell him, I’ll tell him,” I said. At some point, I would.

I was having too much fun, the butterflies in my stomach couldn’t settle down, and this was going too well. I decided to take control. The next time we saw each other, my friends were going to be there. Lots of them. Not Eva, but everybody else: noisy, difficult, and nosy, and turning this whole thing into a platonic friendly outing where no intimacy was possible and I wouldn’t have to bring up Cambridge. Maybe I should give up on the Prague trip, as Adela had suggested. That would give me two more weeks here, and how often in my life would I meet a guy this sexy? Plus, most of my friends weren’t leaving until the end of June; that would give me just a bit longer with them, too.