“You’re right about the black. But if you don’t go after all this, I’ll murder you. Try this on!”

Thanks to Adela, I found myself in stiletto boots at work the next day, something I would not normally have worn to work in the U.S. Here, a high-heeled TV show hostess only the day before had demonstrated how to fit a ten-minute step exercise program into my daily routine. “After ten minutes,” the show’s hostess promised, panting, “I can promise you that you will have had a serious workout.” Well, that explained why I couldn’t find a good spin class in this city. Taken in context, French skinniness was even more annoying than it had been from the other side of the Atlantic. “Mais attention to your feet!” She tapped the four-inch heel of her boot; and just when I thought she was going to tell her viewers that this was insane footwear for exercise, she clarified her point: “Always exercise in heels. How else can you get yourself in shape for the workday? After all, you’re hardly going to leave the house in flat shoes.”

Balanced on my own stilettos in Giulia’s office and slicked out in black again, I folded my arms across my chest and clenched my fists. “I’m not going,” I told Valérie and Giulia.

“Yes, you are, too, going,” Giulia said.

“If you don’t go, you’ll never be able to hold your head up around here again,” Valérie said. “What’s so hard? You get on the bus; you go meet him; you like him, or you don’t like him. Americans!”

I didn’t, at the time, seize on that bus reference, but I should have. Valérie knew I usually took the RER train or walked from Luxembourg, where we worked, to Châtelet, where I had agreed to meet Sébastien. But after work, as the three of us were passing the bus stop on the way to the RER entrance, Valérie and Giulia each snagged an elbow and stopped me before a green-trimmed bus plastered with advertisements for Lord of the Dance and the Galeries Lafayette. “Where do you think you’re going? This is your bus.”

I frowned at the Galeries Lafayette ad. French supermodel Laetitia Casta beamed back at me from under the giant red heart on her head. Sébastien was so cute he could probably date Laetitia Casta if he wanted. “At six o’clock? I could walk faster, with all this traffic. I was going to take the Métro.”

“Yes, but with a bus, we know where you’re going.” They smiled. “On foot or in the Métro, you can go anywhere you want, can’t you?”

“I can’t do that on the bus?”