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the development of the market and the other studies carried out by the team were worth studying.
     
    Jacques looked at her for a long time.
    In his eyes, all she could read was surprise.
    He didn’t say anything else.
    She concluded that her argument had won him over. She accompanied the director of the institute to the lift.
     
    Nothing had happened.
    Nothing serious.
    It had taken her several weeks to return to that scene, to remember it in its entirety, to realise the extent to which every detail had remained in her memory – the man’s hands, the lock of hair that fell across his forehead when he leaned forward, Jacques’s face, what had been said, what had gone unspoken, the final minutes of the meeting, the way the man had smiled at her, his look of gratitude, the unhurried way he gathered up his things. Jacques had left the room without saying goodbye to him.
     
    Later Mathilde had asked Éric how he thought things had gone. Was what she said hurtful, discourteous? Had she overstepped the mark? In a low voice Éric answered that she’d done something that day which none of the rest of them would have dared do and that was good.
     
    Mathilde had gone back over the scene because Jacques’s attitude towards her had changed, because nothing since had been as it was before, because it was then that the slow process of destruction that would take her months to recognise for what it was had begun.
    But she always came back to this question: was that all it took for everything to collapse?
    Was that all it took for her whole life to be subsumed in an absurd, invisible struggle which she could never win?
     
    If it took her a long time to admit what was going on, the spiral they had embarked on, it was because up until then Jacques had always supported her. They had worked together from the start, defended their common positions, shared the same boldness, a certain taste for risk and the same refusal to take the easy option. She knew his tone better than anyone, the meaning of his gestures, his defensive laugh, his stance when he was in a strong position, his inability to give up, his upsets, his rages and his emotions. Jacques had the reputation of being a difficult character – he was known to be demanding, curt and unsubtle. People were scared of him and came to her more often than to him, but they recognised his competence. When Jacques recruited her she hadn’t worked for three years. He chose her from the group of candidates that the HR department had selected. She was a single mother of three, a situation which up till then had brought her only rejections. She owed him for that. She got involved in working on the marketing plan, in major decisions about the product mix of each brand and in monitoring the competition. Gradually she began to write his speeches and take control of the management of a team of seven.
     
    That day at the end of September, in the space of ten minutes, something had come tumbling down. Something had interfered with the precise high-performance mechanism which governed their relations, something she had neither seen nor heard. It began the same evening, when Jacques expressed surprise in front of several people at seeing her leave at six thirty, having apparently forgotten the numerous evenings she’d sacrificed to the company in order to prepare group presentations and the hours she’d spent at home finishing off reports.
    And so a different mechanism was set in motion, a silent and inflexible one which wasn’t going to stop until she cracked.

The first thing Jacques did was decide that the few minutes he spent with her each morning running through priorities and current projects was a waste of time. She’d just have to manage on her own and ask him if necessary. Likewise, he stopped coming to see her in her office at the end of the day, a ritual he had observed for years, a short break before going home. On more or less plausible pretexts, he avoided every opportunity to have