For anyone who has been quietly carrying a question.

One evening in late autumn, he sat in his usual restaurant, as he has for months: writing a question. The question is always the same. Years into a corporate career he is no longer sure he wants, with a business idea he has never had the nerve to start. He asks himself: should I quit?

This time, a woman he has never seen before sits 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 stayed and climbed the corporate ladder, the other who quit and built a company. Both real enough to argue with. Both certain they made the right call, and both quietly resentful of the life they didn't get to live. Across four months of conversations, some tender, some combative, some that end with him closing his laptop mid-sentence, he asks them: which one of you is happier? The answer is not the one he expected.

Shoes in the Hallway is about ambition, doubt, technology, and the architecture of an unmade decision. It is not a guide for how to decide and doesn't pretend to be. But for anyone who has sat with the same question late at night - safety of a corporate job or a leap into the unknown - this is your story. 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.