Six months ago, my best friend and part-time fairy godmother, and Tabby’s actual godmother, handed me a brochure whose contents felt more forbidden than that godforsaken apple in the Garden of Eden.

Because that brochure contained hope within its glossy pages.

Hope in the form of non-invasive, laparoscopic heart surgeries by the most experienced paediatric cardiothoracic surgeons in the world.

Hope that can only be a reality for the lucky children whose parents have six figures to drop on the noble cause of making their kids’ medical worries go away, just like that.

I was pissed off when Athena showed it to me, and I was even more pissed off when she offered to pay for the whole shebang with money she’d earned in the hardest way possible up until last month: by having sex with rich, powerful dickheads whenever they wanted a piece of her.

No fucking way. I don’t know how she’s done it all these years, even if she’s a nympho to my nun on the sexuality scale. Besides, if I let her fix this for me, then I honestly don’t know what would be left of me.

Mum. Carer. Provider. Those roles consumed the rest of me years ago. They’re all I am these days, and I’m damn well not going to let anyone else do my job for me.

It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that a friend and fellow escort of hers, Sophia, casually suggested that I do a stint with their agency in order to fund a US-based valve replacement for Tabs. It was a solution so improbable, so unhinged, and so outrageously pragmatic that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

The women on Seraph’s books are full-service executive assistants who get paid seven figures a year by their bosses for the privilege of fucking them whenever they (their bosses, that is) want. And while I’m the first to admit that for the past four years the merest thought of my best friend enduring that career has given me hives, the concept of me enduring it, for a few months, anyway, has grown less outlandish the more I let it percolate.

If you remove the following small details—that I haven’t actually had sex since my married music professor seduced me, knocked me up, and dumped me at university, or that my sexy skills would barely warrant someone slipping me fifty quid afterwards, or that Athena is so fiercely protective that she won’t even discuss it with me—then the dilemma I have is so achingly simple that, really, there’s no dilemma at all.

My daughter needs her pulmonary valve replaced yesterday.

And it is technically within my power to take action and fund that replacement in the safest, most expedient, and least invasive way possible.