It’s just me, and the artists, the retired, the unemployed and the young mothers with strollers. I press down the metal lever – it’s cool in my hand – the foghorn sounds and the doors slide open. A man gets off, pushing past me in a mood, and three of us get on. I take a seat halfway between the doors, put in my earbuds and scroll through to the podcast I started this morning on my commute into work. It’s just been revealed that the DNA evidence we’ve relied on until this point may not mean what we thought it did. Because DNA doesn’t exactly stay put. We leave it on escalator rails, door handles, coins and public transport. It can then be transferred onto anyone or anything that touches it, travelling with them before being transferred again. So right now, each and every one of us has our genetic material on a hand we’ve never held, in a room we’ve never even entered. And that’s scary as shit, because if you can’t rely on the certainty of DNA, what the hell can you rely on in this world?

I look around the carriage as I listen to the narrator. Beyond her voice I can hear a baby cry and I look towards the sound. His mother picks him up, coos. A man nearby makes goo-goo faces at him. The train stops, a couple of people get on, a few get off, and then we speed up again.

A couple of girls in matching school uniforms are sitting together laughing.

Something twinges inside me and I scroll through my pictures, smiling down at the ones Camilla and I took on Saturday at Disneyland: our faces squished up together before the haunted house. Me looking fake terrified in the line outside Big Thunder. A selfie of us in sequined Mickey Mouse ears in front of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

The brakes screech and I look up at the board. A little white light flashes beside Hôtel de Ville.

The doors open. The foghorn sounds. People get off. Others get on. I watch them fumble around and take their seats. Glancing at their shoes – sneakers, ballet flats, brogues – and then their faces. We start to move again. The baby has stopped crying now and the schoolgirls are sitting silently scrolling through their phones. Behind them stands a man who’s—

My heart stalls.

And my breath gets très fast.

Because it’s him.

At least, I think it’s him. He’s wearing an unbranded navy cap but he looks exactly like what Camilla described: tall, dark, beaky and somehow familiar. It’s like I’ve seen him before but I don’t know where.