She grinned. It’s no secret that he admires her – who wouldn’t? – and today she was looking beautiful, in a velvet dress down to the floor and ankle-boots in the same shade of cornflower blue.

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Zozie’s an attractive woman, and Laurent is at that age when a man’s head is most easily turned. But it struck me that now we’d have him underfoot every day between now and Christmas, cadging free drinks, annoying the customers, stealing the sugar and complaining about the neighbourhood going to the dogs and—

I almost missed it as I turned away and she forked the sign behind her back. My mother’s sign, to banish malchance.

Tsk-tsk, begone!

I saw Laurent slap at his neck, as if an insect had bitten him there. I drew a breath – too late. It was done. So naturally – as I myself would have done in Lansquenet, if the past four years had never happened.

‘Laurent?’ I said.

‘Must go,’ said Laurent. ‘Things to do, you know – no time to waste.’ And, still rubbing the back of his neck, he hauled himself out of the armchair he had been occupying for the best part of half an hour and almost scuttled out of the shop.

Zozie grinned. ‘At last,’ she said.

I sat down heavily on the chair.

‘Are you all right?’

I looked at her. This is the way it always begins: with the little things; the things that don’t count. But one little thing leads to another, and another, and before you know it, it has started again, and the wind is turning, and the Kindly Ones have picked up the scent and—

And for a second, I blamed Zozie. After all, it was she who had transformed my ordinary chocolaterie into this pirates’ cave. Before she came, I was quite content to be Yanne Charbonneau – to run a shop like other shops, to wear Thierry’s ring, to allow the world to run its course without the slightest interference.

But things have changed. With nothing much more than a flick of the fingers, four whole years are overturned, and a woman who should long since have been dead opens her eyes and seems to breathe . . .

‘Vianne,’ she said softly.

‘That’s not my name.’

‘But it was, wasn’t it? Vianne Rocher.’

I nodded. ‘In a past life.’

‘It doesn’t have to be the past.’

Doesn’t it? It’s a dangerously attractive thought. To be Vianne again; to trade in marvels; to show people the magic within themselves . . .

I had to tell her. This has to stop. It isn’t her fault; but I cannot allow it to go on. The Kindly Ones are still on our trail, blind as yet but horribly persistent. I can feel them coming through the mists; combing the air with their long fingers, alert to the smallest gleam and glamour.