The door wasn’t locked, but I locked it behind me after I was inside. Lock, deadbolt, chain. Click, slam, slide. Everything felt instantly better. When kids played tag in the Parc des Délices, older kids, not mine, they called the place where they were safe, the spot where they couldn’t be gotten, the maison magique, and what could have been more right than that.

It is the most wonderful thing really, to have a door, a personal door that is all your own, that you can shut on everything else. Of course all the real true magic is in locks, wood panelling and hinges.

I found M playing a game in the living room with E. He held B, sleeping, gurgling and coo-dreaming in the crook of his arm. I walked past them with my bags and he laughed and said, Well, I see you found what you were looking for. I smiled and curtseyed a little with the bags, playing, playful, fun. Just a little shopping, I said. I set the bags down in the guest room and closed the door.

M and I went to Paris for our honeymoon. We spent all our money on the plane tickets and hadn’t planned a thing beforehand, so we found ourselves stuck in a hostel in a really terrible part of town. M in the men’s dorms, me in the women’s. For seven nights we slept on plastic mattresses, listening to the snores of other people, their bouts of nighttime itchiness, their French cheese farts. It was, I swear to god, the most romantic thing.

We’d meet each morning at breakfast and kiss over juice-machine apple juice, watery butter packets and limp croissants. I would sit on the same side of the table as him and we would look out at all the other people paying fifteen euros a night for the privilege of being in Paris. For being right there where we were. I would lean into his shoulder and press my face into his old college hoodie that smelled of chemical detergent and other people’s socks and he would jump up and get me another cup of push-button coffee if I asked him, anytime I asked him to.

For a week we walked up one street and down another. We shared baguettes. We marvelled at enormous doors. When it rained we walked along the Seine because that way we had the whole river to ourselves. We went to museums but they hardly mattered. Nothing in them was alive like we were alive. In the Louvre a tour group took a picture of us kissing in front of the Venus de Milo. What I’m trying to say is, we didn’t even know the statue was there.

M lost his wedding ring in Paris. It was a half-size too big and it slipped off his finger while we ran through the Gare de Lyon trying to catch the late-night train back to the hostel. We discovered his empty finger just as we took our seats. Just behind us though, a woman, yelling at a station attendant as she boarded the train, pushed a small child through the closing doors and squeezed in afterwards herself. This child was playing with the ring. M’s lost one. She was flipping it between her fingers and when she dropped it we snatched it up while the mother, who we were afraid of because of the way she had been yelling, wasn’t looking. The child only stared at us. We hopped off the train at our stop and ran all the way back to the hostel. We had it back, the ring, and it never slipped again. After that, losing it and finding it again, it was the perfect size. M thought maybe he’d made a mistake, maybe the child hadn’t been playing with his ring at all, but how could we have been wrong? How would it have been possible for us to steal something? We who were so in love. Paris is for lovers and everything in Paris belonged to us. What could have been more true than that?