She wakes to the sound of scales, played over and over. Always with the same mistake. Then a few simple pieces, and again. Just like every other day. She can’t stand it for another minute. She has to get out. She grabs her things and heads for the Sainte-Geneviève Library.

I can feel the weight of her satchel, the dull ache under her right shoulder blade. Her new black ballet flats rub her feet raw, but she refuses to give up. She will break them in. I laugh at how upset she gets about the dog shit everywhere. And how she has no idea it won’t be any better in Prague soon.

I decide to go to the Louvre with her.

A bit too classical for my taste, but she loves wandering there among Corot’s landscapes. She says it makes her homesickness bearable. She insists there are more animals and trees here than we’ve ever seen together. She’s so young. And still, she’s right.

We get lost enough that we can’t find our way out. Somewhere between Mesopotamia and Egypt, we meet another Elena.

She’s roughly my age. She doesn’t see the statues or the paintings. What amazes her is something else entirely — how anyone could have built all this. How much it costs. How much it must make. How it’s constructed, and why exactly like this. She keeps circling back to the scaffolding she saw earlier, wrapped in aluminum, shaped like a giant Louis Vuitton trunk stretching across an entire façade on the Champs-Élysées.

“Of course you turn a renovation into the most luxurious ad imaginable. But in Prague, you’d spend longer getting the permits than the whole thing would take to build.”

She’s militant. And she’s right.

That afternoon, in the Marais and the Latin Quarter, we pass at least ten more Elenas. There’s a specialised bookstore for each of them. Their faces buried in books they can’t get enough of, barely managing not to ruin them with their saliva. So much pleasure it borders on the obscene. I look away.

I fix my eyes on the distance, northeast, toward Père-Lachaise — and there she is.

Sitting on a bench. To her left, small clouds of used tissues. To her right, her own heart split clean in two. Scattered around her, the broken hearts of others.

So much sorrow that, anywhere else, neither of us would be able to bear it.

On my way home that evening, I notice them. A whole crowd of Elenas, walking quietly behind me.

I turn around. They pretend nothing is happening. I move, they move. I look right — so do they. Left — the same.

As if it were the most normal thing in the world.