She knows Anouk’s school friends by name, asks after her teachers, discusses her clothes. And yet she never makes me feel uncomfortable; never asks the questions anyone else in her place would ask.

I felt the same with Armande Voizin – back in the days of Lansquenet. Unruly, mischievous, naughty Armande, whose scarlet petticoats I still sometimes see out of the corner of my eye, whose voice imagined in a crowd – so eerily like that of my mother – still sometimes makes me turn and stare.

Zozie is nothing like her, of course. Armande was eighty when I knew her: dried-up, cantankerous and old. And yet I can see her in Zozie – her exuberant style, her appetite for everything. And if Armande had a spark of what my mother called magic . . .

But we do not speak of these things now. Our pact is silent, but nonetheless strict. Any indiscretion – even as much as a spark lit – and once again, the little house of cards goes up in flames. It’s happened before in Lansquenet, in Les Laveuses and a hundred places before that. But not any more. No. This time, we stay.

She came in early today, just as Anouk was leaving for school. I left her alone for less than an hour – just time enough to take Rosette for a walk – and when I got back the place looked brighter, somehow; less cluttered, more attractive. She’d changed the display in the shop window, spreading a swatch of dark-blue velvet on to the pyramid of tins that filled it, and on top she had placed a pair of bright-red, shiny, high-heeled shoes, brimming over with foil-wrapped chocolates in red and gold.

The effect is eccentric, but arresting nevertheless. The shoes – the same red shoes she was wearing on that first day – seem to shine in the dark shop window, and the sweets like buried treasure spill across the velvet in cubes and fragments of coloured light.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said Zozie, as I came in. ‘I thought it could do with a bit of a lift.’

‘I like it,’ I said. ‘Shoes and chocolates . . .’

Zozie grinned. ‘Twin passions of mine.’

‘So – what’s your favourite?’ I asked. Not that I really wanted to know, but professional curiosity made me ask. Four days, and I am no closer to guessing her favourite than I was before.

She shrugged. ‘I like them all. But the bought ones aren’t the same, are they? You used to make your own, you said?’

‘I did. But then I had more time.’

She looked at me. ‘You’ve got plenty of time. Let me look after the front of the shop, and you can work your magic in the back.’

‘Magic?’