Giles paid the sales assistant and picked up his small but fairly weighty bag of purchases. Nothing could intimate more clearly that his time in Paris was almost at an end than the burden he carried back to the nearby hotel. He waited for the lift, wondering how life could go back to normal after the last week. One question kept running through his mind over and over again. 'Where do we go from here?' In some ways they had begun to know each other so much better than they ever had when they worked side by side in Sunnydale. Yet, in others, the distance between them was as wide as the ocean that would soon separate them.

From force of habit, he gave a warning knock and entered the suite through Anya's room rather than his own.

"Did you get them?" Anya asked excitedly, rising from her seat in front of the dressing table mirror, scooping back her half-dried hair into a ponytail at the back of her neck.

Giles nodded, dropping the bag onto the coffee table, next to the ice bucket and pair of wine glasses that waited there. He lifted the bottle, reading the famous Moet & Chandon label and noting the excellent vintage before he pushed it back down into the ice. "I see we're celebrating," he observed dryly, though he'd seldom felt less in the mood.

Anya came to perch on the arm of his chair, lifting the bag and peering inside. She pulled out two thick but compact photo albums, each capable of holding a hundred photographs according to the loops of printed card that held them shut. She placed the dark green one on the table in front of Giles and the one with the purple metallic cover nearer her, ignoring them in favour of the bright yellow and red envelopes which she tipped out next. The watcher observed as she quickly flipped up the front flap of each packet and sorted them into chronological order before she removed the earliest shots from their pack.

At first she leaned across, showing him each image before she bent forward to deal them like cards, one copy for his album, one copy for hers. Anya, pretty and wistful in the funicular railway car that they had taken to reach Sacre Coeur; him standing in front of the doors into the church; Anya, a carrier bag full of fresh bread, soft cheese and wine at her feet, sitting at a table that barely fitted on the street corner outside the café before the pavement pitched down at an alarming angle toward the Moulin Rouge and the nearby sex shows and purveyors of risqué lingerie. There were a few of Montmartre cemetery with its crypts, some barely bigger than a telephone box but with elegant stained glass windows, and the raised graves, some lovingly planted with flowers despite the fact that their occupants were so long dead that their green-fingered angel was unlikely to have known them. Those pictures, Anya had insisted, were for Buffy, so that she had something to compare with the graveyards she was used to, but Giles suspected that the beauty and tranquility of the scene and the sense of history that pervaded it would have attracted the former demon anyway.

Anya gave a small snort, covering her mouth and nose with one hand as she looked at the next one. Giles reached to take the bundle from her hands but she didn't relinquish them. Instead, she slipped forward to kneel between the armchair and the coffee table, placing the photos out of easy reach as she lifted the champagne from its resting place, peeling off the foil, untwisting the wire that held the cork in place and then easing the stopper loose with barely a pop.

Giles stood up, reaching over her to take the open bundle of photos while she poured the sparkling wine into the waiting flutes. "I fail to see what's so amusing," he protested half-heartedly, pretending that there was nothing out of the ordinary in having his photograph taken next to a glass case that housed a large diamond-encrusted butt plug.

Anya's lips twitched again as she passed him one of the glasses. "Other than the fact that you practically have a speech bubble over your head saying, 'Oh dear Lord!'?" she asked.

"Well, I must admit that it didn't really surprise me that you found the museum of erotica."

"It was right there on the main street, Giles. All I had to do was open my eyes."

"Quite!" he answered cryptically as she moved onto the next picture, where she mimicked the pose of the poster behind her, somehow managing to look more alluring fully dressed than the naked model she imitated, even if he knew that her laughter had been short-lived.

Raising her glass in a toast, she gave a sad smile. "To Paris."

One by one, she shared out their memories. After Montmartre came the catacombs. There was Notre Dame, Versaille and then Disneyland. At first, they had queued for a few of the rides, but once you've faced down vampires and demons, going over a few bumps in a rollercoaster isn't really enough to trigger an adrenaline rush. So, as the queues got longer, they'd simply explored the grounds and Giles had won or bought her an armful of soft toys, narrowly avoiding the Thumper effigies. The smiles in those photographs were real. The fireworks had faded into the velvet night before remembrance had haunted her eyes.

There were some of them outside The Louvre, where Anya had clutched her catalogue, her eyes lighting up as she exclaimed over the millions of dollars that various pieces had been valued at or bought for, almost as if instead of marble or oil on canvas there were bars of gold bullion piled up before them. The couple who had taken a photograph of them together had thought that Anya was his daughter. He hadn't had the heart to correct them, and to his surprise neither had the normally forthright Anya.

The last ones were in the restaurant where they had gone on their first evening out. Anya had insisted that they go back so that she could say goodbye to the owner. Again, she had asked Giles to play, and she had caught several shots of him in action before she had passed the camera over to the restaurateur who had used the rest of the film to catch Giles and Anya in candid shots while they sat at the bar so that Anya could chat with him and catch up. Giles watched as Anya's fingers lingered over those photographs, as if the images were a three dimensional surface she could touch, as if she wanted to touch the face in those photographs but she couldn't.

"Anya... What do you plan to do when you leave here?" He knew it was almost cruel to expect her to make any decision at this point, but he didn't know what else to do. "You know my offer is still open... and if you're worried about the shop, I'm sure Tara could be persuaded to take over some of your hours when she's not at college. Even Spike might pitch in if he's offered sufficient incentive."

Anya winced and twisted to look him in the eye. "It's not that I don't want to, Giles... Maybe, if I save up, I could come over for Independence Day or Labor Day weekend or something? I want to come... too much. If I don't go back now, I never will, and I won't lose the shop, as well, not when I worked so hard for it. If I go tomorrow, I've got a few days to find an apartment and move in before The Magic Box is due to reopen."

"If you need any help..." he found himself offering.

"I have your phone number, and the number for the leasing agent you used to rent from."

"I meant—"

"I know. I just have to do this for myself... learn to be myself. Just Anya. Not half of a couple. Just me."

Giles sat back a little further in his chair, letting the hand that had almost reached out to touch the strands of her hair drop down over the side of the chair, but he nodded. "I understand," he answered her, though he couldn't keep the disappointment from his voice.

"I was thinking," Anya began cautiously, "that maybe I should get a two-bedroomed apartment this time. Somewhere to put my computer and so I can have friends to stay... when they come to check up on their business interests."

"You expect them to check up on you regularly, then?" Giles asked, hope beginning to dawn once more.

"I think it would be very lax business practice if they didn't make the trip at least once every couple of months."

"Well, we certainly couldn't have that, could we?"

Anya's eyes were still overly bright as she raised herself up on her knees and brushed her lips to his cheek. In an instant she had returned her attention to the photographs, opening up his album and starting to slot the images into the plastic pockets as if the kiss had never happened, but Giles' fingers brushed his tingling skin and he knew that it had.