He has been drawing me. I caught him the other day, watching me as I slept. He told me he’s fascinated with the way our faces change when we’re no longer trying to hide. When we are back to being our true selves, not constrained by the social niceties we project every second of every day.

He is putting together an exhibition and I fear I’m going to be at the center of it all, but he won’t let me in the studio (it’s nothing more than a lean-to out back, which reminds me of my dad’s old shed at the bottom of the garden). Says he cannot show anyone until it is ready. In the meantime, he’s been charming all the local galleries, trying to find someone to take a chance on the complete unknown.

He did let me in the studio once, when he was working on a commission for some grande dame who took a shine to him in Paris, asked him to send her something fabulous, as long as it wasn’t a nude. He painted a group of men playing boules in the small park just behind the harbor. All flat caps, linen shirts and braces, with rolled-up cigarettes between their teeth and a lifetime of memories, of the horrors they’d witnessed during the war. Said it was his way of putting the truth on her wall, even if she was too rich and privileged to ever truly understand what that was.

I sat and watched him paint, which is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The way he allows it to consume him, to become a part of him. Trusting that the picture, the idea, he holds in his mind, will be freed by the stroke of brush on canvas.

It was his idea for me to type with my eyes shut. To push away all the doubts, to allow the muse to flourish. So every night after my shift at the hotel, I have been coming back here to type, with a bottle of red wine, some cheese, and a baguette to keep me going. Only there was something about tonight. About the fullness of the moon, surrounded by stars reflected back tenfold into the sea, that made my mind too distracted, too sad, to write.

Part of me knows I came here to try and spite Noah. Because he’s jealous of Antoine, and I let it happen, encouraged it even. He so rarely showed me how he felt, let alone said it. All those nights wrapped up in each other’s arms. Sharing our bodies, sharing our desires. You’d think that would be how to get close to someone. But more fool me, because every time, every single time, I would wake to find him gone. Discover him the next evening flirting with someone new.

Gigi never liked him. She’s arriving next week and has already written to say she wants me to go with her, back to Italy. She’s met someone, a chef who has made her fall in love with food all over again. Claims she’s worried about getting fat and him no longer fancying her, but that’s such a ridiculous idea and so I told her that if he can’t see beyond all her curves and lips, to the incredible person she is, then he doesn’t deserve for her to love him.