The receipt was still warm when Lucie slid it beneath her phone to keep the fan from blowing it onto the floor.
She disliked receipts. They crumpled in pockets, faded at the bottoms of bags, and returned three months later at expense-report time with the persistence of bad decisions. Yet the Saint-Loup’s had one rare quality: it had printed straight. Ten euros twenty, two coffees, an apple juice she had not ordered, 7:46 a.m. She circled the juice in red.
“Are you really going to have that corrected?” Salomé asked.
“I’m mostly going to avoid charging the agency for a stranger’s breakfast.”
“Some lost causes reveal themselves too late.”
Lucie looked up. Salomé had set her headphones on her hair without putting them on, a sign that she wanted to keep talking while suggesting the opposite.
“Reconciliation is never a lost cause.”
“There. That’s exactly the kind of sentence that makes me want to steal from petty cash.”
Through Atelier Sillage’s glass roof, that October Monday’s sky was the color of a badly exported file. The agency occupied the second floor of a former trimmings workshop on rue du Faubourg-du-Temple: overly resonant floorboards, white walls repainted before every important visit, tables on casters that made everything temporary even when people had worked there for six years. The meeting room had been named “Fixed.” Maud maintained that it was funny. No one had found the courage to tell her otherwise.
Lucie unlocked her computer. The Maison Sorel presentation opened exactly where she had left it at 11:18 the night before: page thirty-seven, a photograph of a hotel room no one would want to sleep in because the bed looked prepared for an autopsy.
“We’re taking that one out,” she said.
Salomé came around the table.
“It’s Jonas’s favorite.”
“Jonas is in Lisbon.”
“He’s in Montreuil.”
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.