Once, we walked all the way to the Bois de la Bâtie and stood on the small pedestrian bridge over the point where the two rivers, the Rhône and the Arve, met. Look, I said to E, pointing, making sure she noticed that the rivers were two different colours. Making sure she saw the way they swirled together, the way they stayed apart. Afterwards, we walked up the hill to the library and found books about rivers written in beautiful inscrutable French. Well, we were here, in a way, to be lost, to lose ourselves. Why else would we have come?

I loved it in the hotel. I loved the days. I called my mother many times and told her this. I told her that everything was new and everything was wonderful. White buildings, red-tiled roofs, blue lake, jewels and chocolate everywhere you looked. Fresh. It was June, and the rain kept away. The sun never got too hot. There was always a cool breeze coming off the lake.

If I wanted to take E to the lake to feed the swans, the lady at the reception desk would give us bags of stale bread, and while we were gone maids would go into our room and make the beds for us. I told M he could leave us in the hotel for ever. I told him he could leave me anywhere where there were plenty of young men with silver trays of coffee who would come to my room whenever I rang for them. He laughed and said, Sure, stay for ever, but of course then the memo appeared and we had to find an apartment.

The last night in the hotel I put E and B to bed early and ordered a half-bottle of an excellent champagne. An older woman who looked like she was probably at the end of her shift brought it up and popped it for me out in the hall. I refused to be disappointed by her perfunctory attitude, by her tiredness, by her not being like the winking young men who brought the coffee. So I thanked her grandly and after she left, drank the whole thing on the balcony looking out over the lake. M was at a work party and I had planned to have him find me with the champagne, with the last sip maybe, still between my lips. Like, oh-there-you-are, and-here-I-was-having-a-really-absolutely-fine-time-on-my-own, but he didn’t come back until long after I had drunk every drop. Until I was half asleep on the sofa.

Who was there? I asked him, sleep-whispering. Oh everyone, he said. You should have come, he said. The hotel had babysitters of course, I could have gone to the party, had even maybe been expected to. But how could I have left E or B with someone I didn’t know? A hotel nanny with a plastic name-tag pinned to her shirt who didn’t know how they liked to be tucked into bed, how E liked the sheet tight against her chin and how B liked to be rocked and rocked.