Paris. Early summer. The chestnut trees on Boulevard Saint-Germain finally bloom and the whole city smells faintly sweet.

A girl named Rosalie at sixteen. Lipstick stolen from her mother’s vanity. Riding on the back of a Vespa through the 6ᵉ with someone she shouldn’t be riding with.

She knows better.

The cuff is for everyone who does it anyway.

Nice. February. Carnaval week. The Promenade des Anglais lost under confetti, brass bands, old men in good suits drinking pastis before noon.

White is everywhere. Every other colour fighting for attention.

They don’t call it chaos here. They call it La fête.

We put it all on the bracelet, every colour, every village, every argument the Midi has ever had with itself. Because the wrist should do what the city does.

Hold everything together while everything else goes wild.

C’est Nice, c’est nous.

Somewhere off the coast of Saint-Tropez. Summer. He was twelve. The beach, the heat, the smell of the Côte d’Azur sea, salt and pine resin and something else he never found a word for.

But the blue he never forgot was the one at six in the morning, down at the water alone, before anyone else was awake, before the boats went out and the noise came in. The sea sat somewhere between navy and nothing, and a strip of pale light stretched across the horizon that had no name and didn’t need one.

He spent years trying to find that colour again, in other waters, other mornings, other light.

Then he stopped looking and made it instead, the deep case holding the darkness of it, the sky-pale bezel carrying the early light, and the small seconds turning quietly at six o’clock, right where the horizon used to be.

C’est ça.