Camille had been too tired to argue with James when he’d insisted on going out to find coffee, a packet of roasted chestnuts and a round, fat Sans Culottes cake, from a nearby café. Her paltry breakfast that morning felt a long, long time ago, and she’d fallen on the food, demolishing it in minutes. Then she’d settled with her coffee, hoping it would revive her. The smell of burned coffee meant home to Camille as much as the scatter of her things around a room or a door she could lock behind her. It would greet her halfway along the Rue de Vaugirard and summon her like a congregation to the church bell. The Au Petit Suisse roasted its own beans and took assiduous care to roast dark enough to mask the poor taste of the cheap Robusta beans. The scent would permeate the whole building for hours, curling up through the stairwells until all their clothes had a semi-permanent acrid whiff. At first Camille found the bitter, black coffee undrinkable. Then as the months passed, like the tuft of horsehair that jabbed her shoulder through the mattress, or the crust of mould around the skirting boards, the bitter taste became a comfort, a symbol of the home she’d forced the world to make space for.

They sat round a gritty pot of burned coffee, so far from their cosy evenings together above the Au Petit Suisse, pretending not to look at Guil’s unconscious body. Camille had taken a handful of chestnuts and was peeling them languidly. A shatter of shells fell off her lap when Al spoke.

‘A job well done?’ she replied. ‘We killed people. It was a disaster—’

‘Do you really care about that?’ Al had sniffed out the remains of a bottle and tipped it into his coffee.

‘Of course I care. I’m not a monster.’

Olympe, arms wrapped around her legs and her forehead pressed against her knees, was next to her. Camille hesitantly rested a hand on Olympe’s shoulder, stroking the exposed skin of her neck in some poor attempt at comfort.

‘I told you getting mixed up in this was too dangerous,’ Al continued. ‘It’s time someone said it to your face: we’re taking way too many risks. Sod doing the right thing – us making it out the other end of this is about as high as we can aim for.’

‘Shut up. Shut your damn mouth. None of this was supposed to happen. You’re the one who said we should go into the theatre. You should have realised they locked the doors—’

She broke off, coughing. She hated everyone seeing her like this. She felt exposed, every weakness and flaw on display.