‘We could be shooting this time next year,’ Matthew had said at that very first meeting, within a minute of her giving him her seedling of an idea. ‘Produce it. I’ll back you.’

‘But I don’t know how,’ she’d said, hating herself for confessing her weakness so quickly.

‘Nobody does, the first time.’

And with that statement, he’d made it real.

She steps over the cracks in the pavement. She doesn’t want to jinx it, not now. Not when everything is so close.

She can see Matthew’s terraced stucco villa in the distance, its pilasters and columns all whiter than white against the leafy green health of the pavement trees. The early evening sun reminds her so much of that party night, when she walked this road, on that occasion without wine but with a Jiffy bag of contracts from the office for him to sign, not expecting to leave with a plan for her future.

‘Stay,’ he’d said to her as he signed the last of the Post-it-marked pages. ‘Come and meet some people.’

She’d been the one to order the canapés and the watermelon martini ingredients for this party, and now she was invited to share in them. To accept them as easy gifts from the waiting staff who circulated in crisp white shirts and black trousers.

Of course she should network. Wasn’t that how the world worked? A pretty assistant, charming her way around a beautiful garden, making a name for herself, evading both men’s hands and the scrutiny of their wives’ tracking gazes.

And yet, despite the fact of her canary-yellow dress candy-striped with orange, and the fact that she’d washed her hair that morning with a shampoo that promised gloss and hold, her head itched and she felt out of step and out of place. Here, the rich looked rich, and the nonconformists wore their asymmetric fringes with confidence. In one corner, a famous actor in shredded jeans and Debbie Harry T-shirt made conversation with an elderly critic turned out in linen suit and white Panama hat and both seemed entirely at ease. Where were the people stuck in between? Uncomfortably halfway to somewhere? Unfinished, barely done with being utter imposters?