But today, Sarah’s appearance was perfect. She stared at herself for a long time in the bathroom mirror. Apart from her tired features, and her increasingly thin frame, which she had managed to hide, her illness had so far passed unnoticed. So why this hesitation, this new reserve in her dealings with colleagues? A curious sense of distance had established itself insidiously over the past few days, a distance that was not her doing.

It took just a few words from her secretary for Sarah to understand.

I’m so sorry, she said in a low voice, and her expression was sad and sympathetic. For a moment, just a moment, Sarah wondered what she was talking about. Had there been some disaster, a terror attack that she hadn’t heard about yet? An unexpected storm, an accident, a death in the firm? It wasn’t long before she realized that she herself was the bad news. Yes, she was the victim, the casualty, the one shrouded in grief.

Sarah stood open-mouthed.

If her secretary knew, then everyone knew.

Inès had told them. She had broken their pact from one day to the next, without warning. She had revealed Sarah’s secret. The news had blazed through the firm like a lit spark on a trail of gunpowder, down the corridors, into the offices, all round the conference rooms, the canteen, even up to the topmost floor, the pinnacle of the hierarchy, to Johnson himself.

Inès, whom Sarah had trusted. Inès, the valued assistant she had chosen and recruited herself. Inès who smiled at her each morning, with whom she shared her caseload. Inès whom she had taken under her wing. Inès, yes, Inès had stabbed her in the back in the cruellest way imaginable.

Tu quoque, fili mi.

Inès had confided their secret to the person most likely to divulge it: Gary Curst, the most jealous, the most ambitious, the most misogynistic of all the partners, the man who had nursed a visceral loathing of Sarah since her arrival. Inès, the traitor, would say she had acted in the best interests of the firm. I’m so sorry, she would say, though her contrite expression revealed otherwise. Sarah didn’t believe for one second that Inès regretted what she had done. She should have known: Inès was subtle, she was political – that elegant expression which meant ‘knowing which side your bread is buttered’. Political meant ‘unafraid to use low cunning’. Inès would go far. Yes, as Sarah had said once: she knows how to stack the odds in her favour.

Inès had been to see Curst, thinking to act for the best; she had told him that Sarah had made mistakes in the case they were handling – the Bilgouvar case, which was crucial for the firm’s long-term financial health. Her blunders were perfectly understandable, of course, given her condition.