You have worked hard to get where you are. To finally make your dream life a reality. It only took four years of university, two more of your master’s, six months of diplomatic training and four languages. Easy.

You arrive outside the house you’ve been assigned. You crane your neck to look up. Six floors. No elevator.

“Parfait,” you mutter, grabbing the handle.

The apartment was in a tired but stunning Victorian building in Montmartre, with ivy curling around the wrought-iron balconies and shutters the color of seafoam. You had accepted the posting to the Embassy in France with excitement—and the naïve assumption that all diplomats lived in places with functional plumbing and someone to carry your bags.

Instead, you got charm, dust, and pipes that groaned like a dying whale when you turned on the tap.

But you loved it anyway.

Your third day in Paris, the kitchen light short-circuited and you tripped on your laptop cord trying to fix it, falling to the wooden floor with a thump and staying on the ground reevaluating your life choices.

There was a knock on your door. You open it barefoot and frustrated and slightly panting.

He stood there with flour on his shirt, blue eyes like the Mediterranean sky on a windless day, and a crooked grin.

“Tu es tombée?” he asked.

You blink. “Pardon?”

“Tu faisais du bruit. J’ai entendu un gros ‘boum.’ Tu vas bien?” (You were making noise. I heard a loud ‘boom’. Are you alright?)