So curious to be a tourist still, here in the city of my birth. But Thierry thinks I’m a stranger here, and he takes such joy in showing me his world that I cannot disappoint him. The gardens are crisp and bright today, pebbled with sunlight beneath a kaleidoscope of autumn leaves. Rosette loves the fallen leaves, kicking through them in great exuberant arcs of colour. And she loves the little lake, and watches the toy boats with solemn enjoyment.

‘Say boat, Rosette.’

‘Bam,’ she says, fixing him with her catlike gaze.

‘No, Rosette, it’s boat,’ he says. ‘Come on now, you can say boat.’

‘Bam,’ says Rosette, and makes the sign for monkey with her hand.

‘That’s enough.’ I smile at her, but inside, my heart is beating too fast. She has been so good today; running about in her lime-green anorak and red hat like some wildly animated Christmas ornament, occasionally calling – Bam-bam-bam! – as if shooting down invisible enemies, still not laughing (she rarely does) but concentrating with fierce intent, her lip pushed out, her brows drawn together, as if even running could be a challenge not to be taken frivolously.

But now there’s danger in the air. The wind has changed; there’s a gleam of gold from the corner of my eye, and I’m beginning to think it’s time—

‘Just one ice cream,’ Thierry says.

The boat does a clever little flip in the water, turning ninety degrees to starboard and heading out for the middle of the lake. Rosette looks at me mischievously.

‘Rosette, no.’

The boat flips again, now pointing at the ice cream stand.

‘All right, just one.’

We kissed as Rosette ate her ice cream by the side of the lake, and he was warm and vaguely tobacco-scented, like somebody’s father, his cashmere-coated arms folded bear-like over my too-thin red dress and my autumn coat.

It was a good kiss, beginning with my cold fingers and finding its clever, earnest way towards my throat and finally my mouth, unfreezing what the wind had frozen, little by little, like a warm fire, repeating I love you, I love you (he says that a lot), but under his breath, like Hail Marys delivered in haste by an eager child too keen for redemption.

He must have seen something in my face. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, serious again.

How to tell him? How to explain? He watched me with sudden earnestness, his blue eyes watery with the cold. He looked so guileless, so ordinary – unable, for all his business acumen, to understand our kind of deceit.

What does he see in Yanne Charbonneau? I’ve tried so hard to understand. And what might he see in Vianne Rocher? Would he mistrust her unconventional ways? Would he sneer at her beliefs? Judge her choices? Feel horror, perhaps, at the way she lied?