On the first full day after lockdown starts, Chris and I mark out our home-working territory. By which I mean that he retreats to his den in the spare bedroom and leaves me with the options of the sofa or the tiny table in the corner of the kitchen. My boss wants to have a meeting on Zoom first thing, and so I make some coffee—very easy given my proximity to the kettle—and set up on the kitchen table, with a cushion from the living room to try to make the hard wooden chair bearable.

James is in a somber mood. Pretty much all of our clients have pulled their contracts; there’ll be very little work for a while. “Sorry guys. Strange times,” he says into his webcam with a grimace.

Strange times indeed.

There’s a bit of chat between the team, but it’s all quite depressing. Someone shares a video compilation called “Funniest Fails of 2020 SO FAR!!” and we all smile dutifully, but no one’s heart is in it.

“Terrible time to hate your spouse,” John says. “Can you imagine if you’d been living a double life?” There is laughter across the displays as I sit frozen in place, a buzzing noise building in my ears as I wait for my carefully constructed lies to collapse around me.

“Oh, my, God,” splutters Nora from her immaculate kitchen in the pretty village of Cheam. “Can you imagine if you had a whole other family!”

Thank God! It isn’t my double life he’s talking about. I stay still and wait though. Wait for the penny to drop with one of them that yes, yes I could imagine. Everyone knows the story of me and Leah and Mum and Dad, even if they haven’t read the book.

It is Fi who eventually realizes. “Shit! Sorry, Megs.” As she says it, the others all stop laughing.

“Yeah, sorry,” John mumbles.

I plaster a smile on to my face. “No worries, guys. Damn though. What would you do?” I learned quickly after the book came out that people love to gossip, to live vicariously, to imagine that they would behave better in certain situations than the protagonists in the stories we all tell. But now this isn’t just a deflection method; I need their ideas. Because I need to find a way to convince Tom that I am simply staying with a friend.

It’s not just Tom I need to convince either. Leah lived so openly, splashed so much of her life on to the internet, that she will be missed. And pretty quickly. With no “Megan” work to be getting on with, I scroll through the Instagram accounts of Leah’s peers, trying to figure out what they are planning on doing now everyone in the country is locked in their homes. It’s been less than twenty-four hours and already Kira from book club has pivoted from posting aspirational content to pretending to be an ordinary person, and has started what promises to be a “series of fascinating insights and humorous anecdotes of lockdown reality #WTF #homeschool #thisistorture #wereallscummymummiesnow.” Eurgh: we’re all scummy mummies now is enough to make me want to stick pins in my eyes.