Ted takes the shoe from her. “She has a point, Joel. Those shoes aren’t very . . . Sam.”

  “Why? What’s very ‘me’?”

  “Well. Plain. You like plain stuff.” He pauses. “Sensible stuff.”

  “You know what they say about shoes like that,” says Joel.

  “What?”

  “They’re not for standing up in.”

  They nudge each other, chuckling.

  Sam snatches the shoe back from him. It’s half a size too small. She eases her foot into it and fastens the strap.

  “Great,” she says, looking at her foot. “I get to pitch to Framptons looking like a call-girl.”

  “At least it’s an expensive call-girl,” says Ted.

  “What?”

  “You know. Rather than the five-quid-no-teeth-blowjob kind . . .”

  Sam waits for Joel’s laughter to die down. “Well, thanks, Ted,” she says, staring out of the window. “I feel so much better now.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The meeting isn’t in an office, as she had expected. There is a problem in Transport, and they will have to pitch in the loading area, where Michael Frampton is going to be overseeing some issue with a botched hydraulic system. Sam tries to walk in the heels, feeling the cold air on her feet. She wishes she had had a pedicure, maybe some time since 2009. Her ankles keep wobbling, as if they’re made of rubber, and she wonders how on earth anyone is expected to walk normally in footwear like this. Joel was right. These are not shoes for standing up in.

  “You okay?” says Ted, as they draw closer to the group of men.

  “No,” she mutters. “I feel like I’m walking on chopsticks.”

  A forklift truck carries a huge bale of paper in front of them, causing them to swerve, and her to stumble, its beep a warning that sounds almost deafening in the cavernous space. She watches as every man around the lorry swivels his head to look at her. And then down at her shoes.

  “Thought you weren’t coming.”

  Michael Frampton is a dour Yorkshireman, the kind who will let you know how hard he’s had it, and simultaneously imply that you haven’t, in any conversational exchange.

  Sam musters a smile. “So sorry,” she says, her voice bright. “We had another meeting which—”

  “Traffic,” says Joel, simultaneously, and they glance awkwardly at each other.

  “Sam Kemp. We met at—”

  “I remember you,” he says, and looks down. He spends an uncomfortable two minutes talking through the contents of a clipboard with a young man in overalls, and Sam stands helplessly, conscious of the casual curious glances of the men around him. Her inappropriate shoes glow like radioactive beacons on her feet.

  “Right,” says Michael, when he finally finishes. “I have to tell you before we start that Printex have offered us very competitive terms.”

  “Well, we—” Sam begins.

  “And they say you won’t have the flexibility now Grayside has been swallowed up by a bigger company.”

  “Well, that’s not entirely true. What we have now is volume, quality and—reliability.”

  She feels faintly stupid as she speaks, as if everyone is looking at her, as if it is obvious that she is a middle-aged woman in somebody else’s shoes. She stammers her way through the meeting, stumbling over her answers and flushing, feeling everyone’s eyes on her feet.

  Finally she pulls a folder from her bag. It contains the quote she has spent hours refining and laying out. She makes to walk across to hand it to Michael, but her heel catches on something. She stumbles and twists her ankle, sending a sharp pain up her leg. She turns her grimace into a smile, and hands him the file. He glances down at it, flicking through the pages, not looking at her. Eventually she walks away, slowly, trying not to wobble.

  Finally, Michael looks up. “We’re looking at serious numbers for this next order. So we need to make sure we’re with a firm that can definitely deliver.”

  “We’ve delivered for you before, Mr. Frampton. And last month we worked with Greenlight on a similar run of catalogs. They were very impressed with the quality.”

  His whole face is an extended frown. “Can I take a look at what you did for them?”

  “Sure.”

  She flicks through her folder and remembers suddenly that the Greenlight catalog is in the blue folder on the dashboard of the van, the one she had thought she wouldn’t need. And that that involves walking out of this loading area and across the car park, in full view of all the men. She looks meaningfully at Joel.

  “Why don’t I go and get it?” says Joel.

  “What other samples have you got in the van?” says Frampton.

  “Well, we did a similar run for Clarks Office Supplies. In fact, we have quite a few different catalogs from last month. Joel, could you—”

  “Nah. I’ll take a look myself.” Frampton starts to walk. This means she has to. She sets off, a little more stiffly, alongside him.

  “What we need,” he says, thrusting his hands into his pockets, “is a print partner who is fast-moving, someone flexible. Fleet-footed, if you like.”

  He is striding too briskly. It is at this point that she turns her ankle again on the uneven surface, and lets out a yelp. Joel thrusts out an arm just as her knees buckle and she’s forced to grab it to stay upright. She smiles awkwardly as Frampton looks at them, his face unreadable.

  Later, she will recall, her ears hot with embarrassment, his muttered words to Joel. The last words he will utter to Grayside Print.

  Is she drunk?

  two

  Nisha Cantor is running furiously on a treadmill. Music pumps in her ears and her legs are pounding like pistons. She always runs furiously. The first mile is the worst, fired by a choleric mix of resentment and lactic acid; the second makes her really, really angry; and the third is where her head finally starts to clear, when she feels suddenly like her body is oiled, like she can run forever, and then she’s angry again because she has to stop and do something else just at the point when she’s started to enjoy it. She hates the run, and she needs it for her sanity. She hates visiting this damn city, where there are people all over the sidewalks, meandering slowly, so the only place she can run properly is this crappy gym, to which the hotel has siphoned its guests while its own superior facilities are apparently being renovated.

  The machine informs her that it’s time for her to cool down, and she turns it off abruptly, unwilling to be told what to do by a freaking machine. No, I will not cool down, she thinks. As she pulls out one of her earphones she becomes aware of a ringing sound. Nisha reaches over to pick up her phone. It’s Carl.

  “Darling—”

  “Excuse me.”

  Nisha looks up.

  “You need to turn your phone off,” says a young woman. “This is a quiet area.”

  “Then stop talking at me. You’re very loud. And please don’t stand so close. I might be absorbing droplets of your sweat.”

  The woman’s jaw drops slightly and Nisha presses her phone to her ear.

  “Nisha, darling. What are you up to?”

  “Just at the gym, my love. Are we still meeting for lunch?”

  Carl’s voice, as smooth as butter, one of the things she has always loved about him. “Yes, but perhaps we could have it at the hotel. I have to come back to pick up some papers.”

  “Of course,” says Nisha, automatically. “What would you like me to order for you?”

  “Oh, anything.”

  She freezes. Carl never says “anything.”

  “You want Michel’s special white-truffle omelet? Or the seared tuna?”

  “Sure. That will be lovely.”

  Nisha swallows. She tries to keep her voice level. “What time would you like it?”

  Carl pauses and she hears the muffled sound of him talking to someone else in the room. Her heart has started to pound.

  “Midday would be wonderful. But take your time. I don’t want to rush you.”

  “Of course,” says Nisha. “Love you.”

  “You too, darling,” says Carl, and the line goes dead.

  Nisha stands very still, her blood pumping in her ears in a way that has nothing to do with running. She thinks briefly that her head may actually explode. She takes two deep breaths. Then she punches another number into the phone. It goes straight to voicemail. She curses the time difference with New York.

  “Magda?” she says, her hand raking through her sweaty hair. “It’s Mrs. Cantor. You need to get on to your man, NOW.”

  When she looks up, a gym attendant, in a polo shirt and cheap shorts, has appeared. “Ma’am, you cannot use a phone in here, I’m afraid. It’s against—”

  “Just back off,” says Nisha. “Go clean a floor or something. This place is a goddamn petri dish.” She pushes past him toward the changing room, snatching a towel from another attendant as she goes.

  * * *

  • • •

  The changing rooms are packed, but she sees nobody. She is running through the telephone conversation in her head, over and over, her heart thumping. So this is it. She needs to clear her head, to be ready to respond, but her body has gone into a weird stasis and nothing is working as it should. She sits down on the bench briefly, staring blankly in front of her. I can do this, she tells herself, gazing at her trembling hands. I have survived worse. She presses her face into the towel, breathing in until she’s sure she’s got the shakes under control, and straightens, pushing her shoulders back.

  Finally she stands and opens her locker, pulling out her Marc Jacobs gym bag. Someone has placed their bag on the bench beside her locker and she shoves it onto the floor, putting her own in its place. Shower. She must shower before she does anything. Appearances are everything. And then her phone rings again. A couple of women look over but she ignores them and picks it up from the bench beside her. Raymond.

  “Mom? Did you see the picture of my eyebrows?”

  “What, darling?”

  “My eyebrows. I sent a picture. Did you look?”

  Nisha holds out her phone and flicks through her messages until she finds the picture he has sent. “You have beautiful eyebrows, sweetheart,” she says reassuringly, putting the phone back to her ear.

  “They’re terrible. I just feel really down. I saw this program on, like, the dolphin trade and there were all these dolphins just being made to do tricks and stuff and I felt so guilty because we went to that place and swam with them in Mexico, remember? I felt so bad I couldn’t leave my room and then I thought I’d tidy up my eyebrows and it was a disaster because now I look like mid-nineties Madonna.”

  A woman has started drying her hair nearby and Nisha briefly considers wrenching the hairdryer out of her hand and clubbing her to death with it. “Sweetheart, I can’t hear you in here. Hold on.”

  She walks out into the corridor. Takes a deep breath. “They look perfect,” she says, into the muffled silence. “Gorgeous. And mid-nineties Madonna is a totally hot look.”

  She can picture him, cross-legged on his bed back in Westchester, the way he has sat since he was tiny.

  “They don’t look gorgeous, Mom. It’s a disaster.”

  A woman comes out of the changing area and passes her, her feet slopping in flip-flops, her head down as she hurries past in her cheap jacket. Why don’t women stand up straight? The woman’s shoulders are slumped, her head dipped into her neck like a turtle’s, and Nisha is immediately irritated. If you look like a victim, why are you surprised when people treat you badly? “Then we’ll get them microbladed when you come home.”

  “So they do look terrible.”

  “No! No, you look gorgeous. But, sweetheart, I really need to go. I’m right in the middle of something. I’ll call you.”

  “Not until three my time, earliest. I have to sleep and then we have self-care. It’s so dumb. They make you do all this mindfulness stuff like it wasn’t being stuck in my head that got me here in the first place.”

  “I know, darling. I’ll call you after that. I love you.”

  Nisha ends the call and dials again. “Magda? Magda? Did you get my message? Call me as soon as you get this. Okay?”

  She is ending the call when the door opens. A gym attendant walks in and spies her holding her phone.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry but—”

  “Don’t. Even,” she snarls, and he closes his mouth over the words. There are some advantages to being an American woman over forty who no longer has any fucks left on the shelf, and he can see it. It is the first thing she has felt glad about all week.

  * * *

  • • •

  Nisha showers, moisturizes her limbs with the gym’s inferior products (she will smell like an Amtrak restroom all day), ties her wet hair into a knot and then, her feet safely on a towel (changing-room floors make her nauseated—the skin cells! The verrucas!), checks her phone for the eighteenth time to see if Magda has responded.

  Trying to suppress the giant ball of fury and anxiety that is swelling in her chest is getting harder. She takes her silk blouse off the hanger, feeling the liquid fall of it sticking to her warm damp skin as she pulls it over her head. Where is Magda, for God’s sake? She sits and glances at her phone again, reaching absentmindedly into her gym bag for jeans and shoes. She feels around and finally pulls out a very tired, ugly, block-heeled black pump. She turns and blinks at her hand for a moment before dropping the shoe with a little gasp of horror. She wipes her fingers on a towel, then slowly opens the bag with a corner of it, peering inside. It takes her a moment to grasp what she is looking at. This bag is not her bag. This is fake leather, its plastic covering already peeling at the seams, and what should be a brass “Marc Jacobs” tag has tarnished its way to a dull silver.

  Nisha peers under the bench. Then behind her. Most of the annoying women have gone now, and there are no other bags, just a few gaping lockers. There are no other bags. This bag looks like her bag—same size, same color, similar handles—but it definitely isn’t hers.

  “Who took my bag?” she says aloud, to nobody in particular. “Who the hell took my bag?” The few women in the changing room glance over at her but look blank.

  “No,” she says. “No no no no no. Not today. Not now.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The girl at the desk doesn’t blink.

  “Where’s the CCTV?”

  “Madam, there’s no CCTV in the ladies’ changing room. It would be against the law.”

  “So how am I meant to find out who stole my bag?”

  “I don’t think it’s been stolen, madam. From what you said, it seems like an accidental switch, if the bags were so similar—”

  “You really think anyone would ‘accidentally’ pick up my Chanel jacket and custom-made Louboutin heels made by Christian himself when they dress themselves normally in . . .” she peers into the bag, grimaces “. . . Primark?”

  The receptionist’s face doesn’t shift a muscle.

  “We can go through the CCTV at the entrance but we’ll have to get clearance from head office.”

  “I haven’t got time. Who was the last person out of here?”

  “We don’t hold those records, madam. It’s all automated. If you hold on I’ll call the manager and he can come over.”

  “Finally! Where is he?”

  “He’s staff training in Pinner.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Give me some track shoes. Do you have track shoes here? I just need to get to my car.”

  Nisha peers out of the window. “Where is my car? Where’s the car?”

  She turns away from the desk and punches a number into her phone. No answer. The receptionist pulls out a plastic packet from under the counter. She looks as bored as if she has just had to listen to a two-hour TED talk on the Drying of Paint. She plonks them on the counter. “We have flip-flops.”

  Nisha looks at the girl, then at the shoes, then at the girl again. The girl’s face is a blank. Finally, she snatches them off the counter and, with a low growl of frustration, wrenches them onto her feet. She hears the muttered “Americans!” as she leaves.

  three

  Never mind, love. Still three to go,” says Ted, kindly.

  They have driven in silence to the next meeting. Sam has spent the past twenty minutes in the van under a cloud of crushing misery, guilt seeping into every cell that once contained what remained of her confidence. What must they have thought of her? She could still feel the disbelieving stares of those men, the barely concealed smirks as she wobbled back into the van. Joel had clapped her on the shoulder and told her Frampton was a wanker and everyone knew he was a late payer anyway so it was probably the best thing all round, but even as he spoke all she could see was the distant curl of Simon’s lip as she had to tell him that she had lost a valuable contract.

  In for six, hold for three, out for seven.

  Joel pulls up in the car park and switches off the ignition. They sit for a moment, listening to the engine tick down and looking up at the glossy-fronted building. Her stomach is somewhere in the footwell of the van.

  “Would it be really bad to go into this meeting in flip-flops?” she says, finally.

  “Yes,” say Ted and Joel, at the same time.

  “But—”

  “Babe.” Joel leans forward over the steering wheel and turns to face her. “You wear those shoes, you’ve got to style it out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you looked . . . embarrassed back there. You still look embarrassed. You’ve got to look like you own them.”

  “I don’t own them.”

  “You’ve got to look confident. Like you just threw them on, you know, while you were thinking about all those big-bucks deals you already signed today.”