It wasn’t even that much money. It had just felt like selling old rope, when they started. James had been able to cut back on the driving, allowing other drivers to take some of his jobs, and devote himself to building this with her. A little run, a piece to camera while she was going along, some exercise and diet tips, uploaded and tagged by James. Really no more than a couple of hours’ work in research and execution, compared with a whole shift for him on the road. But it turned out that to maintain it, you had to keep ramping it up; you had to find enormous quantities of the rope. New people came along, competitors. The business had been built on nothing, so it was never far from her head that it could just return to nothing. And her friends back at the Citizens Advice would pretend to be sympathetic but they’d be full of Schadenfreude, like they always were when someone got out and then it blew up in her face. ‘She thought she could live off that? Off doing videos about running when you’re fat?’ ‘Not fat: plus-size.’ ‘Well, it sounds like it’s been a big, plus-size failure.’ Ha ha ha. People were always so fucking witty about her size when they thought they were behind her back.

Imagining the reactions to her failure – malicious, or just disappointed, as in the case of her mum – drove Michaela to work harder and harder at her brand. She posted more and more stuff, ‘content’ as people had started saying; she replied to every single favourable comment, every request for advice. Before she’d even put the phone on in the morning she would feel tension massing in her stomach, cramping her up: she told James it was because she couldn’t handle dairy any more. He began fetching her matcha lattes the following morning, and even switched to oat milk himself, even though he eventually confessed that it was ‘a bit too much on the oaty side’. Yes, she’d said, you will find that with oat products. He’d persevered with it, he’d kept on finding her dairy alternatives, googling, ordering strange-looking packets from Southeast Asia, and it became too late to tell him that dairy wasn’t actually the problem at all; that he was looking at the wrong thing.