“I was thinking about starting a regular post-lecture social,” he said. “Would you like to be the first member of the Beer Time Team?” He held the door open for her, and Daisy followed the rest of the class down the stairs.

Daisy did fancy it, but Susan and Esther had made her swear on Baby Gordon’s life that she wouldn’t accept any social invitations until she’d freed herself from the clutches of the ones she’d already accepted.

“Sorry, Reggie,” Daisy said, giving his arm a consoling pat. “I’m trying to scale back my socializing at the moment. Maybe next time.”

That afternoon, Esther had Creative Writing. It was a module that she’d been approved for at the start of term, but the first scheduled seminar had fallen during one of her many personal crises, and when the tutor had asked everyone to hand in what they’d been working on, she’d been forced to submit a page crammed full of lovelorn song lyrics and doodles of broken, bleeding, pulpy hearts.

An inclination to idleness wasn’t the only reason Esther had been reluctant to return.

So far she’d missed five out of six classes, but the whole point of this module was to leave students plenty of time to explore their own writing, and she’d pffted away Ed Gemmell’s concerns that she might have been taken off the course.

Dressed in her sports gear, ready to work up a mild perspiration doing yoga, Esther stopped by the university bookshop to grab a copy of her favorite book for the purposes of discussing “the nature of the reader experience,” then made her way to the seminar room. Strictly speaking, her favorite book was Lady Boss by Jackie Collins, but that wasn’t exactly literary, and she’d liked Frankenstein well enough when they’d read it in school. Besides, there was no author more extra than Mary Shelley.

The building in which the seminar was held was about as inspiring as a block of offices. Esther could almost feel her muse withering with every step she took up the three flights to get to the right floor, then dying completely when she turned down a corridor lined with fluorescent lights and linoleum. When she pushed open the door to room 31B, it took a second for her eyes to adjust to the relative darkness within before she saw that thirteen students and one proper grown-up had turned to stare at her.

“Ah, er . . . hello?” The tutor was Dr. Cordoba—dad age but pretending not to be in a V-neck sweater and scruffy hair kind of way. “If you’re looking for fourteenth-century Spanish literature, that’s one floor up. Don’t let the name Cordoba confuse you.”

There followed an echo of a chuckle among the students, as if they’d laughed louder the first time he’d said this.