Late that morning, he received a message from Valérie: THINKING POSITIVE THOUGHTS FOR YOUR MEETING. Those words struck him as extraordinary. How long had it been since they’d written anything nice to each other? He scrolled through their recent texts and saw only CAN YOU BUY A BAGUETTE? or DON’T FORGET TO BRING A FOLDER FOR JÉRÉMIE. Messages in the form of orders. Commemorations of the ordinary. At what point does the lexicon of a love affair turn into something else? After two years, five years, ten? Texts become means of conveying practical information, a far cry from earlier expressions of love and romance.

He reread the message several times. He didn’t want to reply simply: THANK YOU. In the end he wrote that her message was the strength he needed. It was borderline bombastic, maybe even a bit naff, but he wanted to express his true feelings now, whatever they were. A clumsy ‘I love you’ is always better than a sparkling but heartless one-liner. And Valérie was happy with this response, with these words that were bringing them back closer together. They were rediscovering each other.

68

He checked his phone: it was time for his meeting. At last he would confront his tormentor. But of course, this unbearable wait would not end as easily as that. A secretary explained that Desjoyaux was in the middle of a telephone meeting, and he would probably be a few minutes late. Patrick sat on a chair in the corridor, as if he were waiting for news in a hospital. To hide his anxiety, he began surfing the net on his phone; Twitter is the indoor equivalent of a cigarette. One of the celebrities he followed was Yoko Ono, who had just posted something mystical about peace and souls. He didn’t fully understand it, but it seemed to suit his situation. Then again, what did she know about office life? He was a big Yoko fan, but it was easy to toss out mantras on the beauty of life and how every day was an opportunity waiting to be seized when you weren’t about to have a meeting with Desjoyaux.

And that bastard continued to make him wait; his suffering wasn’t over yet. After a while, Patrick wanted to get up and leave, an act that would probably have been tantamount to resigning. But he couldn’t leave without knowing the truth; he wanted to find out why he’d been summoned. What had he done? Maybe a case that he’d mismanaged, although he couldn’t think of one; objectively, his work was good. Nobody had ever had cause to complain about him, and all his clients remained faithful to him. So what could it be? A redundancy on economic grounds? He couldn’t imagine anything else. They had to trim the workforce prior to another merger. But for the company, Patrick’s salary was merely a drop in the ocean. Getting rid of him wouldn’t change much, and would in fact cause problems with a number of cases. But Gerbier had had plenty of clients, and Desjoyaux had still fired him. They’d been redistributed to other employees’ portfolios; accepting this overspill of work was simply expected. If anyone thought they were being worked too hard, well … they knew where the door was. There were thousands of keen young people out there, eager to replace them. The vast competition that existed beyond the walls of their headquarters, whether real or imagined, was relentlessly brought up.