‘Don’t look so scared,’ he said, and she shifted in her seat. That was easy for him to say, she thought. He wasn’t the one sitting across the table from a hugely successful author who clearly had an awful lot to say about her work.

She forced a smile on her face, then took a long drink from her wine glass. It was entirely possible the wine would help her relax enough not to want to crawl under the table and hide. ‘I’m not all that scared,’ she lied. ‘But you’re one of, like, two people who have read my work. Or at least read anything I wrote after the age of sixteen. Before then, I had no wit and forced everyone to read my stuff. It was truly awful. Mostly angsty poetry.’

‘I did a fair bit of that in my teens too,’ Ewan said. ‘But I really don’t know why you haven’t showed off your work more, Jo.’

‘At first, I just didn’t feel the need to. I was writing for me because it was something I found relaxing. Then, when I started to think that maybe it would be nice to have someone read it, I suppose I took the fear.’

‘The fear?’

‘Yeah, that this thing I enjoyed doing, and which brought me joy, was actually a bit rubbish. If someone told me that,’ she said, glancing to the red-pen-scored sheet in front of her, ‘then maybe it wouldn’t bring me joy any more. And I’d stop.’

‘The other side of it is, what if someone told you they loved it? Or someone told you they saw real strengths in it, but here are a few ideas you could use to make it better? It might make you write more and enjoy it more?’

‘It was a big risk for me,’ Jo said. She ran her fingers through her hair and took a deep breath. ‘And I’ve not been feeling particularly brave.’

Ewan sat back in his chair and looked at Jo. His gaze was so intense she almost felt as if he was trying to read all her thoughts, disassemble them and put them back together in some kind of order that made sense. ‘Tell me how you felt as you wrote? When you created those images of the ramshackle cottage on the edge of the beach? The long grass and buttercups? How did you feel when you described the crash of the waves to shore, the buzz of insects, the sting of the sun on bare skin? Or the creeping darkness and the rot setting in?’

Jo sat straight. How had she felt? ‘At times, it felt as if I could pull my hair out with the frustration of finding the exact words I needed to get the description just right.’

‘I’m familiar with that feeling,’ Ewan said with a smile. ‘But what else? Because I know there is something else too.’