‘Are you all right?’ A sweet lady was looking at her with concern.

‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘Just a stitch.’ But the minute the woman was out of sight she slithered behind a floor-to-ceiling arrangement of silver and white snowflakes that had been constructed in the corner where the stairs turned. Safely out of sight, she sank down onto the floor and used her free hand to massage her ankles, which were aching from the strain. She pulled a face as she saw the state of her foot. Her shredded tights. But there was nothing she could do about that now.

Instead, she leaned back against the wall to catch her breath, regarding the state-of-the-art all-singing, all-dancing phone that had so quickly become a part of her new life with uncertainty.

It held all her contacts, appointments. She dictated her thoughts into it. Her private diary. The elation, the disbelief, the occasional doubt. And it was her connection to a world that seemed endlessly fascinated by her.

Her Facebook page, the YouTube videos, her Twitter account.

Rupert’s PR people hadn’t been happy when they’d discovered that she’d signed up to Twitter all by herself. Actually, it had been her hairdresser who’d told her that she was being tweeted about and showed her how to set up her own account while waiting for her highlights to take.

That had been the first warning that she wasn’t supposed to have a mind of her own, but keep to the script.

Once they’d realised how well it was working, though, they’d encouraged her to tweet her every thought, every action, using the Cinderella hashtag, to her hundreds of thousands of followers. Keep them up to date with her transformation from Cinderella into Rupert’s fairy tale princess.

Innocently selling the illusion. Doing their dirty work for them.

But it was a two-way thing.

Right now her in-box was filling up with messages from followers who had watched the web feed, seen the ruckus and, despite everything, she smiled as she read them.