If the Shoe Fits

by Megan Mulry

  “I need some space, Devon. It’s not just that craziness—” She pointed toward the office. “Although that’s a big part of it. I need to be on my own a bit. Please.”

  Devon was still in the shadows at the far end of the flat, near the door to his office, while Sarah spoke from near the front door.

  “You may have cost me a small fortune, Lord Heyworth.” For some reason the honorific seemed despicable all of a sudden; he was so far from honorable. “I have had a forensic accountant working on the books for over a year and a retired Internet fraud investigator from the FBI checking into the perpetrator who has been lurking around my servers for the past few months to see if the two were related. You idiot!” She pulled on her light canvas jacket and finally turned to look at him. “You were both in fucking cyberspace circling around each other. He told me to leave a few holes in my firewall to see if we could draw you out. You are quite the clever one, aren’t you? Rerouting all of your late-night spying through South American open relays. And, in the midst of all this cloak-and-dagger matrix bullshit, I am faced with the very real possibility that one of my closest associates is stealing my designs and selling them to the thieves in China who are replicating them with cheap materials and shoddy workmanship, and shipping them so quickly that they’re on a folding table on Canal Street the same week I stock them uptown on Madison Avenue.” She caught her breath. “I will have to speak to my lawyers about whether or not to press charges. Probably best if you don’t call me for a while. A long while! I’m so mad I don’t even know the right words to convey how fucking mad I am right now. Are you getting that?”

  At least he knows better than to answer that, Sarah thought gratefully.

  She grabbed her computer bag off the dining room table and pulled at the telescoped handle of her luggage. It tilted awkwardly and almost fell over.

  “And by the way,” she barked, “I despise wheelie bags!”

  She slammed his front door as hard as she could, feeling instantly guilty about possibly waking the innocent neighbors, then stormed down the hallway and into the elevator.

  She seethed the whole way down to the lobby and out to the sidewalk, then gave a moment of pure thanks that in the midst of the barren wasteland of a neighborhood that surrounded Devon Heyworth’s barren wasteland of an apartment, one sad, lonely taxi moved slowly along the wet, dark street in her direction. She flagged him down and had never been happier to say, “The Connaught, please.”

  How could someone so smart be so stupid? she wondered about Devon, then realized she might as well be asking the same question about herself.

  She got out of the taxi when it pulled to a stop at Carlos Place, yanking her computer bag over one shoulder and then tugging the now-much-maligned wheelie bag behind her. It nearly tipped over again onto the sidewalk and she almost burst into bawling tears right at the corner of Mount Street. Luckily, the night porter dashed from the lobby and grabbed the innocent luggage.

  “Thank you, Gavin.” She thought she might hug him, then realized he would probably be mortified.

  He widened his eyes slightly in question.

  “Just… thank you,” she muttered.

  She trudged up the few steps to the welcoming hotel lobby, peaceful and quiet at that early hour, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that she was starting to feel more at home in this hotel than anywhere else on earth. She reached her room and thanked Gavin profusely once again for all his help (with a piece of luggage that a toddler could have managed, she thought with a self-deprecating sigh).

  She was too peeved and wound up to get back into bed, but, after all that, it was only a quarter past five in the morning. She drew a hot bath and tried to calm down, tried to think strategically about some of the damage… to her pride and her heart.

  Of course, she was not going to press charges against Devon, unless there was a law against being a complete ass. Still, even if his intentions were honorable, his entire modus operandi was suspect and disturbing. Over the past few months of trying to tease out some meaning from what had passed between them at the wedding and then in Chicago shortly thereafter, and even during these wonderful months of traipsing around glamorous London on the arm of one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, Sarah had always seen herself as the younger, naïve, inexperienced party.

  Now she had to contend with the fact that Devon’s urbane, polished-yet-blasé, fast-car-driving persona was merely a thin veneer over a streak of immaturity a mile wide. All of that absurd posturing—or antiposturing—was ridiculous. On the one hand, he was an accomplished adult: why couldn’t he just man up and show the world the strong, brilliant, intelligent person he was? He had it all backward, flouting convention in order to hide, rather than celebrate, his achievements.

  She stepped out of the cooling bath water and tried to stall for as much time as she could, drying her hair, primping, unpacking, then finally walking the three blocks over to her office-cum-construction site at Bruton Place.

  She couldn’t even bring herself to check her email, still feeling Devon’s stealthy, adolescent, spying presence snaking through the entire weave of her business operation. She telephoned the investigator, Stephen Pell, whom she had hired to research the breaches and left him a message with no specifics, but making it clear that he needed to return her call as soon as possible.

  She left a similar message for Julie Cameron, her assistant in New York, then hesitated before calling Carrie Schmidt in Chicago. She let that moment stew for a while—why had she hesitated? Was it Carrie who had been stealing the computer-aided design files and leaking them to the Chinese counterfeiters? What possible motivation could she have? She had been with Sarah for years; she was paid a generous salary. Sarah made a mental note to have Pell dig a little deeper into Carrie’s activities at work.

  Then she didn’t know whom to call. She wanted to dump everything on somebody.

  Eliot Cranbrook would be a good ear on the business side; after they’d cleared up the potential-girlfriend issues, he’d become a real friend. But there was no way she could be honest with him about the extent of her emotional turmoil. As much as she had come to adore him as a friend, she was always mindful of the Sarah James of Sarah James Shoes that she wanted to present to Eliot. All of the madness about bringing him to Dunlear in May to run interference with Devon was bad enough, but at least it had worked (up until now). The possibility of Danieli-Fauchard making an offer to purchase Sarah James Shoes at some point in the future was real, and Sarah could not risk showing Eliot the full extent of her folly.

  If the folly in question was not her brother-in-law, Bronte would be the next obvious info-dumpee choice. Bronte had endured her share of relationship woes, and she would tell Sarah flat-out whether or not corporate spying (albeit—one hoped—motivated by altruism) was grounds for never trusting someone with your heart.

  Said heart stumbled a bit at that thought. She started to worry that she might forgive Devon anything.

  Sarah sat in the single white desk chair, resting her elbows on the worktable, and looked out the wall of renovated square windows that now gleamed from floor to ceiling out over tiny Bruton Place. The raw structure of her office was starting to shape up: polished concrete floor, exposed brick walls on the east and west, and a wall of concealed built-in storage framing the frosted glass door to the stairs behind her. Devon had whipped those lazy workmen into a crew of avid craftsmen. The store was going to be beautiful.

  He’s not all bad! her Devon-loving half yelled in her mind.

  Devon had convinced her to splurge on the glass wall of windows in order to retain the original steel frames (which had also required complete refurbishment). The glass-pane order probably accounted for the glazier’s entire year’s profit, but it was worth it. Sarah looked down toward the street, as if through a kaleidoscope of crisp, one-foot-by-one-foot jeweler’s loops. The effect was superb. The beams of the early morning sun came through in a beautiful, fractured array. One of the young women w
ho worked in the adjacent gallery was walking to work, chatting animatedly on her cell phone, large brown leather purse slung over one shoulder, paper coffee cup in the other hand.

  It was good here.

  London made Sarah feel alive and vibrant and part of the throbbing urban beat, like she did in New York, but also safe and protected—at home—like she did in Chicago. But while Manhattan was blocks and blocks of urban grid and Chicago had an urban center that gradually segued out into tree-lined neighborhoods, London somehow managed to tuck bits of country right into the weft of the metropolis. She sighed and tried to shake off the feeling that she wanted this to be her home.

  She wanted this to be her home with Devon.

  Her stomach fell at the involuntary direction of her thoughts.

  Damn it! She’d been so busy being furious at him—at his stupid, obsessive meddling—that she had very handily avoided considering how much she loved him.

  She was not meant to fall for a defective hero. Her hero was supposed to be flawless. Geeky, late-night, internecine Internet sabotage was definitely not part of the equation.

  Her heart started pacing a nervous beat. She needed a distraction.

  Chapter 17

  Sarah called her grandmother.

  Cendrine, the nonmaid maid, picked up on the second ring. They spoke in rapid French.

  “You might as well stay on the line, Cendrine, to save Letitia the trouble of having to tell you everything all over again. Go wake her up and tell her I need a shoulder to cry on or to be told to quit crying, as the case may be.”

  Cendrine carried the cordless phone and walked back into Letitia’s bedroom. Sarah smiled as she heard the two old biddies begin another day of friendly skirmishes.

  After barging in on her employer, Cendrine spoke in sharp, clipped French, without ceremony. “Pick up the phone, Letitia. Your granddaughter needs to impose upon you for maternal succor… I know, I told her that sentimental rubbish was not your area of expertise, but she seems to think you might have some sort of advice to offer.”

  The other line picked up with a crackle, and Sarah grinned as she envisioned her grandmother in some pink chiffon dressing gown over some highly age-inappropriate negligee and perfectly manicured, arthritic, bejeweled fingers holding the antique white handle of a telephone right out of a Zsa Zsa Gabor movie. Sarah used to tell her grandmother that if Marie Antoinette had ever had occasion to use a telephone, it would have looked exactly like that: gold mouthpiece and earpiece that connected with an antiquated fabric-covered cord to a delicate gold receiver above a white rotary dial.

  Letitia spoke in arch, Bostonian English: “Sarah darling. It is before ten o’clock so I can only assume you are dead.”

  “Very funny, Letitia. I think I may be in a bit of a muddle with The Earl.”

  “It cannot be so! I am looking at the two of you in Paris Match and Hello! right this very minute and you are blissfully happy. It says so right here: ‘The delightful couple shares a magical moment courtside.’ Although, the yellow dress at Wimbledon was completely ill-advised—”

  Sarah laughed through her interruption. “Letitia! This is not a fashion call! You are relentless.”

  “That’s why you called, isn’t it?”

  Sarah smiled. “You’re probably right. I wanted to hear your unique take on the whole situation. I do adore him.” Her face heated at all the ways she had adored him… on every damned inch of his perfect body.

  “Oh, darling. That’s a complication. You are supposed to be the adored. If you adore him, I fear your options are necessarily limited. Try not to be too foolish when you forgive him for all of his atrocities. You might retain a shred of power if you at least wait a few days for him to beg, but he will probably know you are only stalling until you simply must dive back into his arms.”

  “But, Letitia, he was so bad.”

  “Did he hurt you, darling?”

  “No, never. He’s—it was nothing like that. He violated my trust. He has been spying on me—”

  “Oh, how delicious! He’s jealous!” Letitia sounded like a teenager. “I take it back about that shred of power. He’s all yours, darling. Was he following you? Is he skulking around dark corners?!” She sounded excited. “I remember when your grandfather used to follow me around Boston—”

  “No! I mean, well, maybe, in a way, if the situation were taking place back in the day, when Grandfather and you were courting—”

  “Now, Sarah! You don’t need to say it as though we were living alongside Paul Revere!”

  “You know what I mean. Well, I suppose the details are unimportant, but he was trying to sneak around some of my business dealings to help me figure out a potential threat to my corporate—”

  “What?! I thought we were talking about matters of the heart, darling. Why are you talking about business? You know I don’t care about any of those petty, bourgeois details.”

  “He—well—it’s still me after all!” Sarah tried defiantly. “Whether it is business or the depth of his feelings, he lied to me. Doesn’t that signify?”

  “Of course it signifies. But was it both business and the depth of his feelings that he lied about, Sarah?”

  Sarah’s silence was answer enough.

  “No one wants to live in a minefield of treachery, I agree, but it sounds like you already know that he hasn’t lied to you about anything of real importance, has he?”

  “Such as?”

  “Do you know how he feels about you? Unequivocally? Does he look at other women when he is with you or does he make you feel like the most beautiful woman in the room? On earth? Is he affectionate with you in front of his family and friends or only à deux? Has he introduced you to his mother?”

  Sarah stared blindly out the wall of windows. She supposed she always knew to be careful what she wished for when she called Letitia for advice, because she would surely get it.

  “Sarah?”

  “Yes, I’m still here.”

  “Well, it is so unlike you to allow me to finish an entire sentence without interruption that I thought perhaps the line had gone dead.”

  “Oh, Letitia. What am I going to do? I’m a mess.”

  “No, you’re not, darling. You are quite the perfect granddaughter.” Sarah felt a tightening in her throat at her grandmother’s rare articulation of genuine affection before Letitia continued, “Do you want me to come to London?”

  Sarah couldn’t hold back the grateful tear that came down her cheek in a quick drip. Her grandmother had never offered to come to her. Sarah had never asked.

  “Yes?” Sarah whispered, with a mix of hesitation and longing.

  “Oh, darling, why didn’t you just say so?” Then turning her voice away from the phone, Letitia began circling the wagons. “Cendrine! Isn’t it fabulous? We are going to London. Go tell Jacques to wipe that mopey Paris grimace off his face and to pack up a few paints and brushes. I want that suite of rooms at Claridge’s that we had right before we were married… oh, I don’t know, probably best to take it for a month. I can’t be bothered to travel for a shorter amount of time than that… oh, remember that visit, Cendrine, it was so romantic, sneaking around London with Jacques. And Elizabeth and Nelson being all appropriate down the corridor, and you were there, Sarah, of course.” Her voice turned back toward the mouthpiece. “You must have been about four or five and your mother had you all dressed up in shiny black Mary Janes with white tights and that red wool coat with the velvet collar and that adorable oversized red grosgrain ribbon in your silky blond hair, and I—”

  “Letitia!”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.” The words were quiet, and Sarah had the feeling that she had never fully meant them as much as she did at that moment.

  Letitia’s short “You’re welcome, dear” held an ocean of love.

  ***

  A week later, Letitia and her small entourage arrived at Claridge’s with the pomp and circumstance usually reserved for dignitaries and despots.
As she always did when traveling within mainland Europe, Letitia was happily ensconced in the comfort of her 1958 Corniche. All of the luggage (“and other bother”) was sent ahead with a bustling, bossy Cendrine in the comfortable if utilitarian Mercedes van, while she and Jacques rode in the buttery leather comfort of the Rolls Royce. The Channel Tunnel was a pleasant change from her previous trips aboard the ferries from Calais, making the trip even more seamless. Luckily, Letitia’s chauffeur had joined the modern age and finally acquired a cell phone. He’d called Sarah to let her know they were nearby, so she was already waiting for them in the lobby when they pulled up.

  Letitia stepped out of the car as fresh as if she had just been driven from a salon across Paris to the Île Saint-Louis, rather than across countries. Her small frame was draped in a silvery gray fox fur stole (small pointed head and beady eyes intact, resting on one shoulder) over a vintage Chanel traveling suit of bouclé wool in a pale rose and gray coarse weave. And the gloves! The pale gray kid gloves. Sarah almost sighed to see a woman in her eighties have such perfect style. There was no irony, just simple, perfect class.

  “Sarah, darling!”

  People along the Mayfair sidewalk slowed their paces slightly, as if witnessing a sociological artifact come to life, which, Sarah supposed, her grandmother was.

  Sarah thought she might crush Letitia’s tiny frame with the enthusiasm of her embrace.

  “There, there, Sarah dear. All will be well.”

  Sarah held back the tears of gratitude that threatened and gave her grandmother a shining smile instead.

  “You’ve never been a crier, dear. That’s better.”

  Jacques was standing near the curb, slightly behind Letitia, stretching his back and taking deep, happy breaths of the cool, moist summer air. “Aaaah, Londres!”

  Sarah gave him a hug and welcomed him in French. “Merci! Thank you for coming, Jacques… I know the disruption and—”

  “Ah, non! I am so pleased that your grandmother can still be bothered. Thank you.” He gave Sarah a quintessentially Gallic wink of appreciation as he let one arm fall over her shoulder. He paused, holding Sarah back a step, and the two of them watched as Letitia began gathering every porter, valet, and concierge of the hotel into her thrall: directing this one toward the back of the car to retrieve her jewelry, that one to bring high tea to her room, another to make an appointment for a hair stylist to arrive in her room at eleven each morning, until it seemed that every employee of the grand establishment was hurrying off to do her bidding. The beauty of her dominion was how she managed to bend everyone to her will while somehow making them eager to do so. She lived in an orbit that others found so captivating, they were more than willing to scrape and bow just to be a part of it. It was enchanting there.