For anyone who has been quietly carrying a question.

On a midweek evening in late autumn, he sits in his usual restaurant, as he has done for months: writing a question into his phone, and deleting it.

This time, a woman he has never seen before sits down at his table. She places a small white card between them and tells him that she can help with his question.

That night, he downloads an app.

The app lets him speak with two future versions of himself. One who took the corporate path and the other who took the startup road. Both real enough to argue with, and both honest enough to disown the choices that made them. Across four months of conversations, he asks them the question he has been deliberating over eighteen months. Only to realize that the answer is not what he expected. He also discovers, slowly, that the conversations are not what they appear to be. That the woman at the corner table has not gone away, and that a tool that lets you choose your life also gives someone else considerable power over what you choose. He had not thought to ask who exactly was helping him, until it was almost too late.

Shoes in the Hallway is a novel about ambition, doubt, technology, and the architecture of an unmade decision. It will be of particular interest to readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, Matt Haig's The Midnight Library, and Blake Crouch's Recursion; readers who want their speculative fiction observational, restrained, and weighted with real moral complexity.