Take my mother, so generous with her gifts, handing out good luck and goodwill as, inside her, the cancer grew like the interest from a deposit account she never even knew she had. The universe balances its books. Even such a small thing as a charm, a cantrip, a circle drawn in sand – all must be paid for. In full. In blood.

There’s a symmetry, you see. For every piece of luck, a blow; for everyone we helped, a hurt. A red silk sachet over our door – and somewhere else, a shadow falls. A candle burnt to banish ill-luck – and somebody’s house across the road catches fire and burns to the ground. A chocolate festival; the death of a friend.

A piece of malchance.

An Accident.

That’s why I can’t confide in Zozie. I like her too much to lose her trust. The children seem to like her, too. There’s something youthful about her somehow, something more akin to Anouk’s age than mine, that makes her more approachable.

Perhaps it’s her hair – long, loose and dyed pink at the front – or her exuberantly coloured charity-shop clothes, flung together like the contents of a child’s dressing-up box, but oddly right on her, somehow. Today she is wearing a nip-waisted fifties dress in sky-blue, with a pattern of sailing-boats, and yellow ballet shoes, quite wrong for November – not that she cares. Not that she would ever care.

I remember being like that, once. I remember that defiance. But motherhood changes everything. Motherhood makes cowards of us all. Cowards, liars – and sometimes worse.

Les Laveuses. Anouk. And – oh! That wind.

Four days – and I am still surprised to find myself relying on Zozie, not just to keep an eye on Rosette, as Madame Poussin used to do, but for all kinds of little things in the shop. Wrapping, packaging, cleaning, ordering. She says she likes it – tells me she always dreamed of working in a chocolaterie – and yet she never helps herself to the stock as Madame Poussin often did, or exploits her position by asking for samples.

I haven’t yet mentioned her to Thierry. I’m not sure why, except that I feel he will not approve. Perhaps because of the extra cost; perhaps because of Zozie herself, who is as far removed from the staid Madame Poussin as it is possible to be.

With customers she is cheerily – sometimes worryingly – informal. She talks constantly as she wraps boxes, weighs chocolates, points out novelties. And she has a knack for making people talk about themselves: enquires about Madame Pinot’s back-ache; chats with the postman on his round. She knows Fat Nico’s favourites, flirts outrageously with Jean-Louis and Paupaul, the would-be artists touting for customers around Le P’tit Pinson, and chats with Richard and Mathurin, the two old men she calls ‘The Patriots’, who sometimes arrive at the café at eight in the morning and rarely leave until dinner-time.