It’s predictably late when Julia finally makes it home. The kids are in bed, I’m reading on the sofa and Michel is doing something on his laptop at the dining table. It’s peaceful after the drama of the day, but the calm is broken the minute she brings her bad mood through the front door. Tension emanates off her; it’s in the way she throws her car keys on the table by the door, in her footsteps down the hall, in the deep line between her eyes when she comes into the room. Michel and I look up simultaneously, but her eyes go first to me.

‘Ça va, chérie?’ Michel gets up to greet her. He kisses her and puts his hands on her arms, looks into her face as she says something in French and lets out a long sigh. He goes to the fridge and pours her a glass of wine, passes it to her as she sits down at the table. She looks at me again, smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

‘Long day?’ I venture.

‘Yes, it was.’ She takes a sip of wine, but doesn’t take her eyes off me. ‘It didn’t go as expected with the sponsor, especially because that important package I needed didn’t arrive. My manager was not pleased.’

I feel a tremor ripple through my body as I look at her, but then I remember Léa’s anger on the court, her small voice in the toilet cubicle, and it fortifies me. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say. ‘Léa’s competition didn’t go too well either.’

‘I know, Michel messaged me.’

She holds my gaze and it’s as though we’re in a schoolyard stare-out, each waiting for the other to look away first. But this is more than a childish game. I think of the package, languishing in a recycling bin, and it feels as though someone else did that, not me. The same person who riffled through her drawers, whose flashes of anger and envy and pain make her act irrationally. And then I blink and look down at my book, because although I know I didn’t say any of that out loud, Julia’s gaze is so direct that it’s like she’s reading my thoughts.

‘It’s been a stressful day all round,’ Michel says. He looks from me to Julia, a perplexed appeaser in a mental punch-up. ‘Thank God it’s Sunday tomorrow. Let’s hope the kids have a lie-in.’

She turns to him and smiles, and the tension lifts like mist evaporating in the sun. And yet it feels like something has changed. Something was said in that moment we held each other’s gaze. Unspoken, but communicated none the less.

Don’t judge her, Michel had said. Yet now it feels like she’s judging me.

SEPTEMBER 1976 Lausanne, Switzerland

SYLVIA