She thought she could prise open one of the upper windows. They were old, and the frames looked rotten, the catches fragile. If only there was a way to get up there…Reminded suddenly of the dead poet Guy Monteray climbing to the apartment above Shakespeare and Company, swinging up by the sign (how shocked she’d been at his behavior, but now it seemed little different from her own), she contemplated the sign that hung above Zachari’s door. But it was very high up—she didn’t have Monteray’s height and long, strong arms—and its fixings looked old and brittle. It might not take her weight.

People climbed drainpipes, didn’t they? And here was such a pipe, running vertically to the left of the door. But where did you put your feet when you climbed a drainpipe? They were hardly ladders. No convenient rungs.

Genevieve walked around the corner, gazing up. The building was so closed to her that it seemed almost willful.

Stopping before the street-level grille covering the basement window, she thought back to the night, all those months ago, when she’d paced back and forth in her Sebastian York snakeskin court shoes, hoping that Zachari would notice her tiny, delicate feet and shapely ankles, and come out to find her.

She couldn’t see any way of getting in. So what now? Check into a hotel? Drink the night away in one of the Montparnasse bars with whatever distant acquaintances were around? She wished she had a friend to call, but her only close friend had turned out as faithless as her absent lover.

She’d wandered slowly all the way out onto the Rue de la Paix before something occurred to her. It was a long shot, but nonetheless…

Back she went to Zachari’s shop, and up to the front door. She grasped the handle and…it turned. The door opened.

The fitting room was sad. Those melancholy purple couches, the empty mirrors. Genevieve’s heels were loud against the polished floor. Unable to believe he would have left the shop unlocked, she called out his name. Nothing. Could he be downstairs?

Another door left unlocked. Paolo’s workroom was very different in the half darkness. The streetlamp outside cast a ghostly glow over the clutter. A couple of abandoned sketches lay on the table showing shoes with strange slats in the sides and odd pointy boots with baubles on the ends like something a court jester would wear. The tools hanging from hooks on the wall were sinister, like weapons.

Wandering around this room, alone, was like reading someone’s diary or going through their underwear drawers. It might all look like clutter—the beads, the jewels, the feathers, the sheets of leather, the lace, the sketches, the dyes, the almost illegible notes—but each item, each bit of fluff, had been carefully selected and kept for a purpose.