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Back The Shoe Queen
Chapters (67)
  1. Cover
  2. “And may I say, those shoes are adorable.”
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. ( I )
  7. ( one )
  8. ( two )
  9. ( three )
  10. ( four )
  11. ( five )
  12. ( six )
  13. ( seven )
  14. ( eight )
  15. ( nine )
  16. ( ten )
  17. ( II )
  18. ( eleven )
  19. ( twelve )
  20. ( thirteen )
  21. ( fourteen )
  22. ( fifteen )
  23. ( III )
  24. ( sixteen )
  25. ( seventeen )
  26. ( eighteen )
  27. ( nineteen )
  28. ( IV )
  29. ( twenty )
  30. ( twenty-one )
  31. ( twenty-two )
  32. ( twenty-three )
  33. ( twenty-four )
  34. ( V )
  35. ( twenty-five )
  36. ( twenty-six )
  37. ( twenty-seven )
  38. ( twenty-eight )
  39. ( twenty-nine )
  40. VI
  41. ( thirty )
  42. ( thirty-one )
  43. ( thirty-two )
  44. ( thirty-three )
  45. ( thirty-four )
  46. ( VII )
  47. ( thirty-five )
  48. ( thirty-six )
  49. ( thirty-seven )
  50. ( thirty-eight )
  51. ( thirty-nine )
  52. ( forty )
  53. ( forty-one )
  54. ( forty-two )
  55. ( VIII )
  56. ( forty-three )
  57. ( forty-four )
  58. ( forty-five )
  59. ( forty-six )
  60. ( forty-seven )
  61. ( forty-eight )
  62. ( forty-nine )
  63. ( fifty )
  64. ( fifty-one )
  65. Acknowledgments
  66. Acknowledgments
  67. Questions for Discussion

She saw him again on the pavement, keyless, climbing up to the window.

He hadn’t known where the bathroom was.

“Oh my God.”

Emerging from the bathroom, a false smile on her face, she found he was no longer in the room.

“Guy?” Where could he have gone?

Something—instinct—made her pick up his cream suit jacket from where it lay on the floor. Something—instinct—made her reach inside it, feeling her way into the inside pocket, finding…a heavy metal object, as familiar as an intimate friend or enemy, although she’d never touched a thing of this shape before.

Heart thudding hard, she almost dropped the gun, but managed to get a hold of herself just in time, replacing it and laying the jacket down silently. Searching across the floor for the remainder of her things.

She had to get out of here. But he must surely be downstairs in the shop, browsing naked among the books. How could she get past him?

“Guy?” She tried to make her voice sound bright. “Where are you?”

“I’m in here.” He didn’t sound like he was downstairs.

“What are you doing, Guy?”

“I’m thinking. There’s a poem in my head and I’m trying to make it come out. It’s good to think in small dark places.”

He was in the broom cupboard.

Quick as a flash, she was out of the apartment and running down the stairs.

“Genevieve?” came his voice, distantly, as she ran through the empty shop and fumbled with the catch on the front door. “Don’t you want to hear my poem? It’s awfully good.”

( seven )

ROBERT WAS MORE THAN a little surprised, on arriving home just before eleven, from an awful evening at the snootiest kind of restaurant (the waiter really could have dropped him a hint that steak tartare comes raw, not just rare, actually raw) with the worst kind of British industrialists (a toad-faced, swaggering, Yorkshire textile manufacturer and his smarmy, snaggle-toothed assistant, neither of whom appeared to possess even the slightest degree of human warmth; my, but those Dark Satanic Mills loomed with startling clarity in his mind’s eye) to discover that his wife was not in.

The sound of distant humming as he passed through the hall (so empty and cavernous now, with the horse away at the cleaner’s) turned out to be Céline. The footfalls from the salon must have been from the floor above. Could the sigh that seemed to emit from the shoe room possibly have been one of Genevieve’s shoes? Perhaps he himself had sighed without realizing it.

Reflecting, gloomily, that this place was unbearably lonely without her in it, he fixed himself a bourbon. Where was she? She’d told him she was going to a poetry event of some kind in the afternoon, but she’d said nothing about the evening. Lulu was behind this, he’d bet on it.