Nick was in the lobby, buying tickets from the window with Charles beside him – I had forgotten Charles was coming. The ticket-seller held Nick’s five-pound note up to the light and rubbed its paper between her fingers, eventually accepting it was real and not something he had knocked up in our shed. I thought it would be fun to surprise Nick with my dolled-up image so I put my coat in the cloakroom, positioned myself behind him and waited for him to turn around. But it was Charles who caught sight of me first. He seemed to halt midway through blowing a stream of smoke to the ceiling and stared. Then Nick himself turned. His eyes widened, then narrowed, and the tickets fluttered out of his grasp to the floor. I glanced about, to see what it was that had fixed his gaze, and that had made Charles stop too, but behind me there was only a fat old woman being helped to the door by an obsequious younger man. Something was very wrong.

Nick’s voice was colder and harder than I had ever heard it. ‘Why did you do that?’ he demanded.

I looked desperately around again. I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘What … what have I done?’

‘You must know.’ His jaw clamped down on the words.

I looked to Charles, hoping he would tell me what had made Nick so angry. But he simply looked back at me. ‘I don’t,’ I said.

Nick lifted his hand. ‘Are you saying this was an accident?’

‘What is?’ I was becoming frantic, checking again over my shoulder in case there was some clue.

He looked grim. ‘Your hair. You dyed your hair red. Like Lorelei’s. And you’re wearing it like she used to.’

‘It’s just the same,’ Charles said. ‘You look just like her.’

The chatter around us seemed to die away. ‘No,’ I said, dragging a curled lock out of the French twist that Stephanie had created for me. ‘But it’s not. It’s not like hers.’ I turned to look at my reflection in a glass panel on the wall. I had thought it would be coloured like Stephanie’s strawberry-blond hair. As I stared at it, I saw that it had, indeed, turned out darker. And it did look just like Lorelei’s had at the party. I hadn’t realized when I was sitting in the chair and Stephanie was teasing it into curls. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘So much like her,’ Charles said, reaching his hand up to touch it.