Return the pan to the simmering water. Now it must reach thirty-one degrees. It is my last chance to make sense of this, and I can feel a tremor in my hands as I look down into the melted couverture. Now it smells of my children: of Rosette with her birthday cake and Anouk, sitting in the shop, six years old, talking and laughing and planning – what?

A festival. A Grand Festival du Chocolat – with Easter eggs and chocolate hens and the Pope in white chocolate—

It is a wonderful memory. That year, we faced down the Black Man and won – we rode the wind, at least, for a while—

But this is no time for nostalgia. Banish the steam from the dark surface. Try again.

And now we are in Le Rocher de Montmartre. A table is set, all our friends are here. Another kind of festival now – I see Roux at the table, smiling, laughing, with a holly crown on his red hair, holding Rosette in his arms and drinking a glass of champagne—

But that’s just wishful thinking, of course. We often see what we want to see. For a moment I am shaken almost to tears—

Once more I pass my hand through the steam.

And now the festival is different again. There are firecrackers and marching bands and people dressed as skeletons – the Day of the Dead, with children dancing in the streets and paper lanterns with demon faces painted on them, and sugar skulls on sticks and Santa Muerte parading through the streets with her three faces watching every which way—

But what can it have to do with me? We never got as far as South America, although my mother longed to see the place. We never even got to Florida—

I reach out a hand to disperse the steam. And it’s then that I see her. A mouse-haired girl of eight or nine, hand-in-hand with her mother among the crowds. I sense they are different from the rest – something about their skin, their hair – and they look around in half-lost wonderment at everything: the dancers; the demons; the painted piñatas on long pointed sticks with firecrackers tied to their tails . . .

Once again, I move my hand across the surface of the chocolate. Little tendrils of steam rise up, and now I can smell gunpowder, a dangerous scent, all smoke and fire and turbulence—

And now I see the girl again, playing with a group of other children in a back alley outside a darkened little shop-front. There is a piñata hanging above the doorway, a striped and fabulous tiger-thing in red and yellow and black. The others are shouting – Hit it! Hit it! – and showering it with sticks and stones. But the little girl holds back. There is something inside the shop, she thinks. Something – more – attractive.