‘I wish I’d met Sabine,’ I say. ‘I only started working there after she had already left. Can you tell me about her?’ I probe. Anything I can add to the eight hundred flimsy words I penned last night will do at this point. Because I can’t even include the truth about what happened on that rooftop; to do so would open Pandora’s box right up. Me being Pandora. And so instead I built on the lie I told Hyacinth and cited ‘creative differences’ as the fuel that sparked the argument between Noah and Sabine and had them leave the party together.

Mme Roux tries to smile at my question, but her eyes grow pink with tears and she looks down, clenching her jaw as if trying not to cry. ‘She was brave,’ she says in a small voice, nodding at her cup.

I glance up at the walls behind her: there are three large framed photographs I recognise from Sabine’s Instagram page. Black-and-white prints of the same woman covering her eyes, her ears and her mouth: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

‘She was such a talent,’ I say gently and my stomach shrinks. This is a lot harder than I expected.

‘With Sabine, everything was about her work,’ Mme Roux says. ‘Most girls are all about boys. Not Sabine. She fell in love with the camera…’ Her eyes cast down.

Then she sets down her coffee cup, it clinks as it hits the saucer, and she gets up and heads off down the passageway somewhere. I look around the room: there’s a big grandfather clock ticking away in the corner. The sort that looks like a little bird might pop out on the hour and say ‘cuckoo’. A bookshelf filled with old books, the kind you know are old because the spines are all shades of navy, brown and burgundy with metallic type. There are silver frames with photographs, mainly of a little girl with dark blonde hair who I assume is Sabine.

Then there are footsteps and she’s back. ‘Here.’ She hands me something black and square. ‘Her work. For the exhibition.’ Then she gives me a connecting cable too.

I don’t want to take it, it feels wrong, but how can I refuse? If I tell her I’m lying now, she’ll lose all faith in humanity.

I smile, drop it into my handbag and take a sip of my coffee.

She’s sipping her coffee too but her hand trembles and the coffee spills out onto the saucer. ‘Pardon,’ she says, her cheeks flush.

That’s it. I’m out. Enough is enough. Because even if Mme Roux knew all about the lie I’d just spun, she couldn’t hate me any more than I hate myself right now.

‘Of course,’ I say. But my voice comes out strangled. ‘I should get back anyway.’