All the things she’d done her absolute best to suppress…‘What I’d like to suggest to you is a regular contribution based on your own experiences of entertaining, household management, the small oddities of family life. Not a diary as such, more a conversation with the reader. A chat over coffee, or lunch with a friend.’

Everything about that sounded perfect-if she ignored the fact that she didn’t have a partner, let alone a husband and the charmingly precocious children she’d invented were an amalgam of those she’d encountered in her ‘day’ job-or at least their mothers’ sadly mistaken assessment of them. As for entertaining, the only effort she put into that was to call out for a pizza.

And what the heck was ‘household management’ when it was at home?

‘My proposal is this. An initial contract for six months at our usual rate, and then, if the readers respond as favourably as I anticipate, we’ll talk again. Does that interest you?’

This, Ellie decided, was about as close to her worst nightmare as it was possible to get. She’d finally got her first breakthrough, her first real recognition as a writer, and it was all based on lies.

She couldn’t do it.

‘I expect you’d like a little time to consider it?’ Mrs Cochrane said, when she didn’t immediately answer.

Could she?

‘Maybe you’d like to talk it over with your husband?’ she pressed.

‘My husband?’To hear the words, spoken so casually, left her momentarily floundering. ‘No,’ she finally managed. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

Sean, wherever he was, would be grinning like an idiot, cheering her on, saying, ‘You show them, Ellie. Take the balloon ride…’

Mrs Cochrane really liked what she’d written. She’d be doing the woman a favour if she said yes. And she’d be getting paid for writing on a regular basis-proof for her parents, her sister, that she wasn’t just chasing some will-o’-the-wisp daydream. She’d have something to show an agent, too. And she’d only be writing under a pseudonym of sorts, after all. People did that all the time.