He’s not even French, Harper, he’s American.

And I know I could be embarrassed right now, mortified that I stood there oblivious to who he was, talking about him in the third person while he let me. But I’m not. All I can think is: Touché.

Because that’s the exact sort of thing I might do.

Noah X just became a lot more interesting to me.

But now the air fills with the sound of a chair being pulled across the floor.

‘Are you coming?’ Wesley asks. I look up at him, he’s standing now, holding a sheet of paper, a notepad, a pen and a coffee cup with a red cat on it.

‘Of course,’ I say, picking up my own coffee cup, notepad, pen and the printouts before following him along the grey carpet towards the meeting room.

‘Harper,’ Hyacinth says as I move inside. I try to read her expression – is that an I-loved-your-story or an I-hated-your-story blank stare?

Everything you need to know about Hyacinth can be gleaned from her name and title: Hyacinth Cromwell-Scott, Editor-in-chief of The Paris Observer. She’s very British, very tall, has lived in Paris since the ’80s, has worked on everything important and knows everybody worth knowing in Paris. I know all this because I did my due diligence (i.e. cyber-stalked her) before I came over on the Eurostar for my interview. What the internet didn’t warn me of, however, was her poker face; it’s impossible to know what she’s thinking from her expression. Most of the time I find myself trying to figure out whether I’m on the verge of losing my job via decoding the grammar in her messages. It’s harder in real life. There’s no punctuation.

‘Close the door.’

Shit. Not good.

I do as she says then turn back to the room. Along the wall facing me, windows with peeling paint look out onto the streets of Bastille: a row of green and turquoise Vélib’ bicycles, a street-side café with black graffiti covering the stone-washed apartment above it and trees with leaves that are turning the colour of rust. I take a seat beside Wesley and glance around at the other faces.

Twelve people are sitting at a big round dark wood table. Even though everyone introduced themselves on day one, I’m still not sure of all their names. The only one I’m certain of is Stan, the blond guy sitting at the other end of the table from Hyacinth. Partially because he does the news and politics stories and that’s the job I wish I had, and partially because when Hyacinth was walking me from desk to desk on day one, introducing me to everyone, he said, ‘Wow, you look just like the dead girl we’re not allowed to write about anymore’. Then he glared at Hyacinth.

That’s the sort of thing that gets you remembered.

So there’s him. Then there’s Wesley, Hyacinth, five randoms I’ve seen around intermittently and suspect might be freelancers, and three girls facing me, their hair backlit by the window behind them. Three little angels. The middle one is Claudia. She’s loud, brash, Italian, wears bright lipstick, and she’s the one that cried last week. She was barely in the office when I first started, but flounced in every now and then to talk loudly about how fantastic Paris Fashion Week was. But when she wrote about it, Hyacinth did not ‘love her work’. Mainly, however, Claudia writes about celebrity gossip, most of it secondhand and sifted from American or UK tabloids. Even though we might be broadly described as belonging to the French version of a tabloid – la presse people – France has stronger privacy laws than its international counterparts, and so Hyacinth gets very antsy when she thinks we might get sued.