Kate can’t help but be impressed at how quickly he can do that – switch from irritable and argumentative to confident and charming. Everyone in the small group is gazing up at him, rapt, hanging onto his every word. It’s a cliché but he really can light up a room. It’s what first attracted her to him, over ten years earlier, when she walked into the cold, damp church hall in North London. She’d never thought of herself as the type of person who’d join a self-help group but she was desperate. Asthmatic since the age of eight, she’d gone to her GP complaining that she was having trouble breathing, particularly in the evenings, and wanted to know if the doctor could increase the dose of her preventative inhaler. Her doctor listened to her chest and said she couldn’t hear any wheezing or rattles. She monitored Kate’s oxygen saturation and declared it normal. Kate pleaded. She could barely breathe in the evenings and she’d done everything she could to make her situation better – she was hoovering daily, she’d installed a portable air filter and she’d even invested in a machine to remove the dampness from the air (which seemed to collect a lot of water from her first floor converted Victoria flat). The GP agreed that they should try a new preventative inhaler and told her to come back if things didn’t improve. They didn’t, and ten days later Kate returned to the surgery saying that, if anything, her breathlessness was worse. The doctor listened to her chest and checked her vitals. Still normal. She prescribed Kate a tablet to help with her allergies and sent her away. The fourth time Kate sat in front of her doctor she begged for a chest X-ray. She didn’t have a cough, she was in her early thirties and she’d never smoked in her life but breathlessness was a symptom of lung cancer and she’d become convinced that she had it. The X-ray results came back clear.

‘Is there anything that might be provoking the breathlessness?’ the doctor asked. ‘What is it you do in the evenings?’

‘I work, same as I do in the day. I monitor my social media. I answer emails. I check out my competitors’ YouTube channels. I look for speaking opportunities.’

‘Speaking opportunities?’

‘I’m a PR consultant. I’ve been targeting big businesses but I’m not getting anywhere. I keep getting down to the final two but if it’s me against a man, the man gets the gig.’

‘That sounds frustrating, and stressful.’

‘It is!’

The doctor shifted in her chair, crossing one leg over the other. ‘Stress can cause asthma flare ups. Have you looked into relaxation techniques – meditation, yoga, mindfulness, that sort of thing?’

‘Who’s got time for that when they’re trying to get a business off the ground?’