Afterwards, it felt like there was nothing left. I was burnt out, like if you cut me open, all that would come out was smoke. I stopped reading, unable to focus on a book for more than few pages before my mind wandered somewhere else and didn’t come back. Then I stopped reaching for my notebook, stopped scribbling down the snatches of conversation I overheard on the top deck of the bus or a sentence that, when I put the words in the right order, suddenly sang. And just like that, I stopped writing.

So I waited. I adopted a dog. Moved somewhere I could see the sea. Got a job, served tea and cake to people who wouldn’t look me in the eye. A year passed. Then two and still, nothing.

All I wanted was for someone to tell me that everything was going to be okay, but then it occurred to me that, as a writer, that’s what I do. Or I should. I should put into words the things that are too big – too awful – to articulate. The things most people cannot. If I do my job properly, you’ll finish one of my books feeling seen and, I hope, knowing that you’ll get through this, no matter how insurmountable this is.

I hadn’t realised how lucky I was that I could do that until I couldn’t anymore. Writing was how I made sense of the world, so not being able to do it was a different kind of loss, but it was equally unfillable.

So I stopped waiting, told myself that it didn’t matter if I didn’t write again. That was before. This is After and After involves walking my dog along the beach every morning and serving tea and cake to people who won’t look me in the eye and that’s okay because at least I made it through the fire.

But some people did wait. Malorie Blackman. Nikesh Shukla. Catherine Johnson. Sara Barnard. Holly Bourne. Eleanor Wood. Juno Dawson. They each sat with me while I cried and told them that I’d never write again knowing full well that I would, that once the smoke had cleared After would feel less like a room I’d wandered into and couldn’t find my way out of and more like somewhere I wanted to be.

Jan Kofi-Tsekpo at The Arts Council, who, when that finally happened, gave me the time to write, otherwise I would not have had the space or the confidence to finish telling this story. Polly Lyall-Grant at Hachette Children’s Group who saw something in it when I did and her team – Halimah, Emily, Aash, Alice and the copy editor and proofreader and typesetter – who turned it into the book that you are holding now. Including Sarah Maxwell who illustrated the stunning cover that made me scream the first time I saw it.