I wet the tip of my finger and drew the sign of Lady Moon Rabbit in the dust on the floor. That’s my sign, Zozie says. A circle with a rabbit inside. It’s supposed to look like the new moon, and it’s the sign of love and new beginnings, and I thought that since it’s my sign, then perhaps it would work better on Roux.

‘What’s wrong?’ He smiled. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

Perhaps it was that word, cat. Or perhaps it’s because I’ve never been much good at lying, especially not to the people I love. In any case, I blurted it out. The question that had been burning a hole in the roof of my mouth ever since my talk with Zozie—

‘Do you know you’re Rosette’s dad?’

He stared at me. ‘Say what?’ he said. There was no mistaking the shock in his eyes. So he hadn’t known; but from his face he wasn’t what you’d call pleased either.

I looked down at the sign of Lady Moon Rabbit and drew the broken cross of Red Monkey Tezcatlipoca next to it in the floury dust.

‘I know what you’re thinking. She’s kind of small for a four-year-old. She dribbles a bit. She wakes up at night. And she’s always been slow with some things, like learning to talk and using a spoon. But she’s really funny – and really sweet – and if you give her a chance—’

Now his face was the colour of the sawdust. He shook his head, like it was a bad dream or something that he could just shake away.

‘Four?’ he said.

‘It’s her birthday next week.’ I smiled at him. ‘I knew you didn’t know. I said, “Roux would never have left us like that. Not if he’d known about Rosette.”’ And I told him then about when she was born, and about the little crêperie in Les Laveuses, and how ill she had been at first, and how we’d fed her from an eye-dropper, and about our move to Paris, and everything that happened there . . .

‘Wait a minute,’ said Roux. ‘Does Vianne know you’re here? Does she know you’re telling me this?’

I shook my head. ‘No one knows.’

He thought about that one for a while, and slowly his colours went from quiet blues and greens to splashy reds and oranges, and his mouth turned down, hard, not like the Roux I know at all.

‘So – all this time she never said a thing? I had a daughter, and I never even knew?’ He always sounds more from the Midi when he’s angry, and right then his accent was so thick that it could have been a foreign language altogether.

‘Well, maybe she didn’t get the chance.’