Charles de Gaulle airport is a mess. Camille is so elated she doesn’t immediately remember where she parked her car, and once she does, and I’m sitting in the passenger seat next to her, it takes forever for the queue of cars we’re in to make it out of the parking lot and off the airport premises. While Camille utters the occasional expletive—I think—in French and throws her hands in the air in exasperation, there’s no room in my heart for frustration or road rage. I’m in a car with her. She’s taking me to her house. I’m here for a month and a half. I haven’t been to Paris since Rebecca and I celebrated our tenth anniversary. I’m ready to make some new memories here, with the new woman in my life. All the time I’ve had to wait, which seemed like decades while I was doing the actual waiting, seems to have dissolved into nothing, a mere speck in the course of my life, because the reward of being with Camille is so big, it obliterates the tiniest negative emotion I carry inside me.

I have no idea what time it is. The dashboard clock says 9:18 but it doesn’t feel like it could possibly be nine in the morning. It doesn’t matter. One look at how Camille navigates us through the bumper-to-bumper traffic onto the périphérique is enough for fatigue and jet lag to become distant notions, small nuisances that hold no meaning in this brand new, dazzling universe I just walked into.

Camille talks and talks, her accent more pronounced than when I met her in Sydney. She chatters about her one-month old granddaughter Emma and how she can’t wait to introduce me to her family, but this first weekend will be only for us. No one else is allowed inside her house except her cat and me. She has instructed Flo to only call her in case of extreme emergencies.

“Obviously, I didn’t want to spell out to my daughter what her mother was going to do all weekend long.” She looks at me and waggles her eyebrows suggestively. “But I think she got the picture nonetheless.” She chuckles and shrugs.

“Ben’s in Provence with a bunch of his university friends,” she says. “They’re staying in the house we used to go to every summer when Jean-Claude and I were still together. I’d like to take you there. Show you all aspects of my life.”