At 6:42 p.m., Julien sent the message to the wrong person.
He was standing outside a supermarket near République, holding a paper bag containing two tomatoes, a bottle of washing-up liquid and the bread he had forgotten to buy that morning. His phone was at four per cent. He had copied a paragraph from his notes, intending to ask his friend Hugo whether it sounded ridiculous.
Instead, he pasted it into Camille’s conversation.
There’s something I haven’t told you. I’m into ABDL. For me, that includes wearing adult diapers sometimes, privately. I don’t know how to explain it without making the whole evening about that.
Above it, her last message read: Seven thirty still good? I’m bringing the terrible blue umbrella.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Julien, thirty-five, who managed delivery schedules for a furniture company and could untangle a missing shipment in six minutes, stood motionless beside a stack of shopping baskets.
Then his phone died.
The café with the uneven table
By the time he reached his flat, he had invented four excuses for cancelling. A burst pipe. A migraine. An urgent work problem. None explained the message, but all gave him something else to discuss.
He plugged in his phone and watched the empty battery symbol.
Camille’s reply arrived before he had taken off his coat.
“That sounds like a conversation, not a cancellation. See you at seven thirty?”
She was thirty-three, restored old picture frames and had a habit of remembering the smallest thing he said. On their first date, he had mentioned disliking coriander. On their second, she had silently moved a garnish from his plate to hers.
He had been hoping for a third date uncomplicated enough to lead to a fourth.
At the café near the Canal Saint-Martin, she was already seated beside the window. The blue umbrella leaned against her chair. One spoke had escaped the fabric, giving it the appearance of a failed engineering experiment.
“You came,” she said.
“I considered emigrating.”
“Before dinner? Ambitious.”
He sat down. The table rocked. She pushed a folded receipt under one leg without looking.
One question at a time
Julien had prepared an explanation during the walk. It began with a definition, included three qualifications and ended with an apology. Camille interrupted before he reached the second sentence.
“Was that message meant for me?”
He looked at his glass.
“Eventually.”
She laughed, then stopped when she saw his face.
“Sorry. It’s just a very precise answer.”
He told her about the draft, Hugo and the dead battery. She admitted she had spent twenty minutes wondering whether he expected her to know the abbreviation already.
“I looked it up,” she said. “Then I decided the internet was giving me twelve different answers to a question I could ask you.”
The waiter brought two glasses of water and asked whether they were ready to order. They were not. Julien realised he had been holding the menu upside down.
Camille noticed. Mercifully, she said nothing.
He explained what the interest meant in his own life: something private, something he had kept apart from dating because he never knew when to bring it up. He did not expect her to share it. He did want to stop calculating what would happen if she found out later.
“Were you planning to keep seeing me while assuming I’d leave?” she asked.
“That sounds worse when you say it.”
“It sounds exhausting.”
Outside, a cyclist stopped beneath the awning to shake rain from his sleeves. Inside, somebody dropped a spoon. The conversation Julien had imagined as a catastrophe was taking place among the ordinary noises of people having dinner.
The interruption
His phone lit up beside his plate.
Hugo: Did you tell her or are we still reviewing version nine?
Camille saw his expression.
“Your emergency committee?”
He turned the screen towards her. This time deliberately.
She covered her mouth, laughing. “Version nine?”
“There were formatting changes.”
“Naturally.”
When the food arrived, she asked about the furniture delivery he had complained about on Tuesday. For several minutes, he described a sofa that had travelled to the wrong town. He was halfway through the story before he noticed she had let the subject change.
Later, she returned to it herself.
“I don’t know yet where I fit with that part of your life,” she said. “I’m curious. I might have awkward questions. But I’d prefer you answer those instead of answering for me.”
“I can do awkward.”
“I’ve noticed.”
The terrible blue umbrella
They left after ten. The rain had become a fine mist, enough to settle on their coats without persuading either of them to hurry.
At the canal, Camille opened the umbrella. The broken spoke caught Julien’s scarf.
“Very romantic,” he said, trying to free himself.
“You were warned.”
Once released, he stood close enough for her to take his hand. She did it with the same matter-of-fact confidence she had used to steady the café table.
At the corner where their routes separated, she kissed him, briefly, then pulled back.
“Sunday?” she asked.
“I’m free.”
“Good. And Julien?”
He waited.
“You can send version one next time.”