Moving to Paris meant leaving everything, and everyone, behind. It meant a final severance from family, a parting of the ways with Will, goodbye to London, the city she’d grown up in, her inspiration, her home. True, as Will and others pointed out, it was only a short hop under the Channel on Eurostar, but Isabelle knew that if she made the move to Givenchy and the upper echelons of the fashion world, her life would not be her own. She would spend the next twenty years walking the highwire, in the spotlight, without a safety net. It would be exciting, glamorous, and rewarding on every material level – and then she would be in her forties, no kids, too thin, hard as nails, her neck sore from always looking over her shoulder at the latest pretender to her crown.

Now she’d got it, she wasn’t sure if she wanted it.

Will said he’d never speak to her again if she didn’t go. He wanted to be able to say ‘my friend Isabelle at Givenchy’, to get tickets to all the best shows and to have a very nice place to stay whenever he fancied a long weekend in Paris. Ben thought it would be ‘cool’, and everyone else just asked her outright how much she’d be earning.

Her parents told her to do whatever she thought was right. Her publicists thought it was the best news since the Angels appeared to the Shepherds. Everyone was keen, except Isabelle, who was afraid.

She set up a make or break meeting with Walker Parker. If they could come up with a persuasive argument for keeping Cissé based in London, expanding the brand and selling not just at home and the US but in major retailers all over the world, she would stay. If not – if they only wanted to keep her for their own financial gain – she would leave.

Fiona Walker was not there.

‘She’s ill,’ said Dan with a smile, as if he might have poisoned her. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me.’

They sat on either side of Dan’s desk. The walls of his office were bare, the shelves empty. There was nothing to suggest a working life, let alone a career in fashion. Dan was wearing a crisp white shirt, the top button undone, brown pinstriped trousers, brown brogues. He’s looking good, thought Isabelle, and wondered whether his dress sense had improved, or whether it was just one of those freaks that badly dressed people sometimes pull off, like a stopped clock being right every twelve hours.

The windows were open. It was the first really nice spring day, when grey skies and drizzle and cold gritty winds were impossible to imagine.

‘So,’ he said, ‘have you come to settle your account?’