Technically, nothing had actually happened between them, so she should just act normally. They were just two colleagues, meeting up with a lot of other colleagues at a sales meeting. Everything was normal.

Except, acting normally was quite tricky when you thought too hard about it. Like when you were a teenager and you came home to your parents’ house a little drunk. The sensible (and normal) thing to do would be to call out ‘goodnight’ and go straight to bed but, no, in the spirit of ‘acting normally’ you would decide now was the time to sit down with them as they watched Inspector Morse and try to have a full-blown conversation which ‘proved’ you hadn’t been drinking.

That was the kind of ‘acting normally’ she worried she might do when she met Paolo again. Minus the slurred speech. Hopefully.

Chapter Five

Shannon

If Shannon was going to find out her life was totally ruined, it might as well be sooner rather than later.

There were pharmacies on every street in Paris. Each one advertising some super cream that would remove cellulite from your thighs and the last twenty years of your life from your face. Right now, Shannon would settle for removing the last two months. How had she let this happen? By letting down her guard, that’s how. And she had sworn that she would never do that again.

It was impossible to get any work done at home with this on her mind, so she’d hailed a taxi outside her apartment to take her to Gare du Nord in plenty of time to find a pharmacy, buy a test and get it over with before she met Kate. Like she’d tried to tell Laura about her order being returned, there was no point worrying about something until it actually happened. Now was as good a time as any to find out if it had.

Five minutes into the journey, she changed her mind. The toilets at Gare du Nord were on a par with a dystopian sci-fi film. There was no way she was going to do the test there. She stopped the cab, jumped out and ducked into the first pharmacy she came to.

Her stomach was flip-flopping as she browsed the boxes on the busy shelves, straightening them as she went, reorganising the ones that had been put back in the wrong spot by a lazy customer. Careless. Though, who was she to judge right now?

How had it happened? Taking the contraceptive pill had been a religious ritual since she was twenty: ten p.m. every single night. Why had it suddenly malfunctioned? It must have been that time she’d had dubious seafood and been in bed for three days afterwards. Why hadn’t she just got the implant done? Or got herself sterilised? Or become a nun?

She stopped tidying and focused on the job at hand. Hopefully, she’d locate the right section in a minute and just take one from the shelf. Otherwise she was in danger of having to re-enact the scene from Bridget Jones’s Diary in the ski resort pharmacy, as her French did not run to ‘pregnancy test’. Should she google it?

Thank God. There was a section for contraception and tests. Strange to merchandise them together. Maybe they should also display them alongside a bottle of wine and a packet of hangover pills?

There was so much choice! Did she want digital? To know how many days pregnant she was? What colour hair the baby was likely to have? Okay, so she’d made up the last one, but seriously? What had happened to a simple yes or no?

Kate’s train was due real soon; Shannon had no time for procrastination. She grabbed a mid-priced one and took it to the counter. Should she buy a pack of condoms at the same time to show the totally uninterested shop assistant that she was a responsible person? The words horse and bolted came to mind. Keep your head down. Pay for the test. Get out.

Once the test was safely stuffed into her handbag, there was a second dilemma.