‘Hmm,’ Camilla says. ‘It’s a tricky one.’

‘I’m so fucking stressed.’

‘Okay,’ she says, pausing. ‘Just remember, you’re not the married one. And it’s not like you knew. Sex is hardly illegal. And you’re in France. Doesn’t everyone cheat over there?’

This is why I love Camilla. Even though she’s the romantic one between us, the one who believes in soulmates and marriage and all that, she still has my back regardless.

‘I’m not sure his wife will look at it like that and she’s super connected. And I’m still in my probation period – Hyacinth could just fire me. God, I could lose my entire career over this before it even begins. It’s a shitshow.’

‘Hmmm,’ she says. ‘Right, this is what you do. Nobody knows your name, right?’

‘No.’

‘So you never talk to this guy Noah again. And you haven’t contacted that Sabine girl yet, have you?’

I shake my head.

‘Well, don’t. Then she’ll have no idea who you are either. If you see his wife out somewhere just dodge her. And if anyone asks what you did on Friday, you went home. You were never there.’ She takes another bite of toast. ‘And then just pray to all the gods and goddesses that Sabine doesn’t upload it.’

And then we change the subject. She starts to tell me about the hot guy from work, the one she saw in the elevator, about how she’s figured out he works on the fourteenth floor. And as she speaks, just out of view of the camera, I open that little orange bottle and take one of Anne’s final three Ambiens.

Chapitre dix

I shake the rain off my umbrella at the door and then move into Franprix. It’s bright in here. Fluorescent and vivid. While the sky outside looks like the gods dragged a dirty thumb over it. The contrast is startling and it takes a while for my eyes to adjust. It’s ten past five on Sunday afternoon. I finished my revised article on Noah this morning at around 11 am. The rest of the day was spent watching Netflix, eating dark chocolate, squatting on Sabine’s Vimeo and Instagram pages – nothing new has been uploaded – and googling a million variations on: Agnès Bisset, Noah X wife and Le Voltage. I’m not sure what I was looking for exactly – some sort of indication that things weren’t as bad as they first seemed.

I found nothing of the sort.

Instead, while recent photographs of Agnès Bisset were almost non-existent, I found a splattering of images of a younger Agnès with numerous influential (though tastefully non-ostentatious) types, as well as a profile in a women’s magazine from 2016. She was listed as number two in a piece called ‘Ten most influential women in Paris’. Yes, brilliant. It didn’t state her exact net worth but, from what it did say, I gather it’s substantial enough to be deemed too vulgar to disclose. It then went on to talk about how she attended a famous finishing school in Switzerland, briefly dated the son of a famous socialite in New York, owns three galleries – in Switzerland, Vienna and now Le Voltage in Paris – and, despite being born into the upper echelon of Paris society and inheriting the means to rest on her laurels, has built a name for herself as the Mother Teresa of the art world, tirelessly launching the careers of young emerging artists like Noah X.