We need to talk lawyers. URGENT

Jemima buried her face in the pillow. So, Meagan’s lawsuit was happening and once she’d finished with Jemima, not even deep-sea rescue divers would be able to find the wreckage. Jemima felt like Atlas but instead of bearing the weight of the world on her shoulders, she was carrying a steaming pile of shit. Filth fest, a juvenile political statement, had been a colossal waste of time and upset the one person who’d given her a chance. She’d abused her friends’ trust, using them and because of paralysis in her own love life, she had all but killed Beverly’s. To win, Jemima had lost – massively.

She laughed sadly, realising how closely Beverly’s romantic journey mirrored her own. In her first book, which Jemima had written when she and Miles were still together, Beverly had been in love, entangled with her boss, Kane. That minor storyline had been sensual, dangerous. However, by the time Jemima started writing Beverly Blake Mysteries she and Miles were no more. She killed Kane with a heart attack, leaving him to die in an abandoned lock-up. He was slain in the same way a part of her had died, abandoned and with an unfixable heart. That’s when Beverly had become a single-minded workaholic with no room for anything but the job. Jemima’s push-back at Eve’s notes had been totally disproportionate but only now could she see why. Jemima had always thought she was defending a principle but really she was protecting herself from delving into waters she felt too weak to swim in. There were so many ways she could have handled Eve’s note, a deep dive into her own romantic past was just one solution. Damn it, there were probably YouTube videos on how to write romance but she had done nothing. Instead, she convinced herself that because of the deadline she had no other options. But this didn’t come down to time. It was about Jemima’s unshakable fear that love, true love, breaks you and that hadn’t even started with Miles. That had come from losing her dad. Jemima pulled herself up in her bed as the fragments of her life’s puzzle began to order themselves in her mind. After losing the love of her life, her father, Jemima had constantly settled when it came to relationships. In Miles she’d fallen in love with a compromise because the fear of finding and falling for a great man scared her so much. It scared her because if you loved, you lost – and that pain was unbearable. And this fear had bled into her writing. She had made Beverly so cold and closed off that readers never truly knew her heart. Jemima gasped as the penny dropped so loudly it practically clanged inside her head. Eve wasn’t asking for her to make Beverly need a man. She was asking for her to want one. It wasn’t even about a man. It was about passion, feeling and being fully alive. That’s why the backstory detail had worked so well, because readers could finally connect with Beverly through what she had once desired. Jemima wanted to laugh – a pain-filled, ironic, Alanis Morrissette guffaw.