‘Thanks,’ she called after him before running back upstairs to get her handbag, where she was hoping mightily that she’d put her car keys. She’d been carting bags of groceries into the hall and had clearly forgotten to take her keys out of the front door. She found her bag, and her car keys and sprinted downstairs into the kitchen to turn down the oven where a beef casserole was simmering. The aroma was tantalizing and her stomach rumbled. She’d hardly had time for lunch earlier, making do with a sandwich scoffed on the run. She grabbed a banana and hurried out to the car.

She was halfway down Eccles Street when she remembered she’d to ring Frankie Walsh back. ‘Hey, Frankie, how are things?’ she said cheerfully, relieved to see that the traffic on Dorset Street was flowing smoothly.

‘Let’s say they’ve been better, MC, and it’s one of the reasons I’m ringing you. I heard you were back in town.’ Frankie’s Cavan accent was as pronounced as ever, even after years in the capital.

‘How can I help, what’s up?’ she asked, remembering what fun they’d had in college.

‘It’s Dee, she’s pregnant—’

Ah, Frankie, that’s great news, congratulations,’ she said warmly.

‘Yeah well, we’re delighted of course, but the problem is she has that all-day morning sickness, hyperemesis gravidarum – you know, the one that Kate Middleton had?’

‘Oh no! How horrible.’

‘It is truly, MC. She’s throwing up morning noon and night. She was recording an ad last week and right in the middle, while the voice-over actress was trilling “lazy days of sun and sangria”, Dee threw up into a paper bin and added some stupendous sound effects.’

‘Oh God!’ Marie-Claire laughed in spite of herself. ‘How awful for her.’

‘Fancy coming back to the business? I heard you’re hobnobbing with the D4 set, so we might be a bit downmarket,’ he teased.

‘Are you serious?’ Marie-Claire’s eyes lit up. Frankie had opened up his own post-production company a couple of years back.

‘Look, if you want to, I’d love to have you on board. I’m up to my eyes with a project in LA with a good buddy of mine. We’re working on the Solfeggio Frequencies—’

‘Oh cool! My mum’s really into the frequencies in her holistic work. She uses them a lot, especially the 417 Hz.’

‘Yeah, that’s a good one all right, great for clearing the past,’ Frankie agreed enthusiastically. ‘We’ve got funding to develop headphones, with the various frequencies tuned in—’

‘Wowza! What a brilliant idea.’

‘I know, and I wouldn’t say this to Dee in a million years, but right when I need her most in the business, she gets preggers—’

‘And I suppose you had nothing to do with it,’ Marie-Claire joked.