I’m tired, should we lie down in the bed? No, that was going to sound creepy. Maybe we could get dinner sometime? No, that was too formal. It made it sound like he was about to get a suit on and open a box with a ring in it, and he didn’t even know her surname yet. Anyway, ‘dinner’ for both of them evoked toil rather than romance. ‘Dinner’ was what you had to turn up at 5 p.m. for; it meant being screamed at to get a calf’s liver on a plate, because people who had some sort of brain malfunction thought that would be a nice thing to eat. It was how they’d started this night, mad as that seemed. Getting in, chatting with Juno, going to the mise en place to ensure the fontina hadn’t run out because Juno had once thrown a live lobster at someone for not checking. How could that still be this same night?

Well, it wasn’t really. That had been 5 p.m. and now it was – holy shit, 6 a.m. Thirteen hours. This was basically a new day. Depending on how you looked at it. His great-grandmother, who was 102, always insisted the new day didn’t begin until you’d been to sleep. She hated it when she was awake past midnight and someone said it was now the morning. ‘The goddam day starts when I wake up,’ she’d say. But the thing was, it looked like Emil wasn’t going to bed at all, unless Steffi came with him, as he continued to hope might happen. He couldn’t just leave her there. And Steffi was so caught up in this quest. Watching the screens like a cat watching a bee, mesmerized by each new whisper. Even though he still thought it was highly unlikely they could find this guy just by spreading it round the internet, it was almost as mesmerizing watching her. It was attractive how much she wanted to win this. How much goodness she must have in her.

This whole night was like he’d ended up in a romcom but he wasn’t sure what the director wanted. And now what about this for a scene: here he was, in a stranger’s shower. If Emil had been shown an image of himself here, when he showed up at La Chimère those thirteen hours ago, he would have been pretty confident there must be a sexy reason. As it was, he’d got in here just because it was the only thing that was going to keep him awake.