Those broad shoulders bent a little. “I don’t want you to have to give up anything for me,” he said, low. “I know you wanted to go to Cambridge. I know you love to travel. I’m sorry you have to choose. So I thought I would at least take you to London for a weekend. It’s not the same as three weeks at Cambridge, I know, but at least it’s something.”

My heart hurt.

“We can go somewhere else if you’d rather,” he said quickly. “I brought brochures for Brugge and Venice, too. But I thought of London first because you had wanted to spend the summer in England.”

I grabbed him and held on tight. “You are amazing. I can’t believe you’re for real.” And that might have been part of the problem: I really couldn’t believe it. He was just too amazing to be true. Or at least, too amazing to be true for me. Which might explain why I had met him in a country on the opposite side of the Atlantic from where I was about to be living.

“Coward,” I repeated Sébastien’s word, staring at myself in the small rectangular mirror over the little sink tucked into an alcove by my door. Residents shared toilets and showers down the hall. I tried again to make my hair look right, but it was hopeless. The chalk in Paris water had destroyed it. The chalk coated my hair and dulled it, drying the ends so that they stuck out and refused to blend, taking away the bounce and leaving only the frizz. Despite extensive searches for a good Parisian stylist and the international conviction that there weren’t any bad ones, I had found no one who knew how to deal with long, thick, fine, curly hair. One woman had bunched all my curls up in a rubber band, upended me, and blunt cut the ponytail, then straightened me and told me it was done. Another, when I requested a deep conditioning treatment, put me into a humidifier instead. Words fail me to describe the results of either of these methods on curls. My hair hadn’t looked good since December, when the two-week stay at my parents’ had helped get the chalk coating out and I’d been temporarily able to luxuriate in a silky feel again. I could see why most Parisiennes gave up and cut most of their hair off, slicking it down with straighteners if they were cursed with curls.

I sighed dispiritedly and noticed I was getting a pimple on my eyebrow. My eyebrow. Why, God? And don’t even tell me it’s the chocolate, God, that’s been scientifically disproven. I bet none of Sébastien’s old girlfriends or kilométrage got pimples on their eyebrows. Especially not just before romantic escapes to London. The phone rang, and I headed out with my overnight bag to join Sébastien.