Maybe in a way this was a good thing: if Mum had a husband and a new baby, it would be that much easier for me to walk away.

And yet… when it came down to it, how could I leave her? Now she was on the verge of having a new life of her own, I was forced to recognise just how much of a wrench it would be to be parted from her.

Dinner that night was challenging, to say the least. It wasn’t just the situation, it was the setting. All around us there were French people seriously eating, mesdames and messieurs and a few impeccably behaved children, and there were waiters with snowy-white shirts and spotless dark uniforms hurrying about with silver plates and bottles of red wine, as if they were all on a mission of extreme but secret importance.

The food looked beautiful, though. For my starter I had melon, which came with a pool of blood-red port in the middle, where the seeds had been scooped out. ‘You’ll get drunk,’ Ellie said accusingly, and I scowled at her to make her shut up. Mark had already poured me another glass of wine to follow on from the one I’d had on the balcony, and Mum hadn’t raised any objections.

Both of them were probably too preoccupied to keep count of how much I’d had. If ever there was an occasion to take the edge off by getting slightly tipsy, this was surely it.

I was half expecting Mum to get out her phone and start taking pictures the way she’d done when Mark took us out for the first time back home in England, but she didn’t. Her Facebook page had been positively enigmatic over the last month or so. Since she’d realised she was pregnant, maybe? Well, sooner or later she’d have a big double announcement to make. I’m getting married. I’m having a baby. And everyone would say, Congratulations! I thought you’d been quiet lately, and now I know why!

After the melon I had crevettes, whole prawns in their shells, which I had no idea how to eat. Mark showed me, which he loved doing, obviously. Teach me, Mark. Show me what to do. Why was I being so mean to him, anyway? The wine seemed to make it easier to be nice. Everything was both more vivid and more unreal than usual, and nothing seemed to matter quite so much any more: the colours and textures had taken over.

Maybe this was what it was like for Dad; maybe this was exactly what he’d been seeking out all those times – this mix of a rush and being out of it.

The soft light of the electric chandeliers, the blue shade of Mum’s dress, the pile of taken-apart prawns on my plate, with their insect-like folded legs and little jelly eyes and pink translucent shells… it was all an adventure, so much brighter and more glamorous than my life had been up to that point, and at the same time it seemed like a dream, as if it could all vanish in an instant.