‘Don’t look so horrified,’ Ewan said. ‘Remember, you’re learning. We’re all learning. It’s very, very easy to write a character as one-dimensional. If you saw the first draft of McCreadie book one, you would see that I was a master of the art.’

She felt marginally better.

‘Remember this is all about making sure your story is the very best it can be. Get the character right and everything will fall into place. That’s my thinking anyway.’

‘Okay,’ Jo nodded, ‘so how do I go about this?’

‘Over more wine, and dinner later,’ Ewan said. ‘Let’s tease it all out, so when we leave the bar tonight, we feel as if Kate is walking alongside us. A fully-fledged, real, possibly little bit crazy, person.’

‘She’s not crazy,’ Jo protested. ‘Just a little misunderstood.’

‘That,’ Ewan said, with a smile, ‘is what they all say. So explain it to me. Tell me her true herself. Why is she so painfully shy? I mean, it’s a whole new level of shy, so much so that she can’t function outside of her very tiny bubble. We need to see more of how she deals with this. I feel we need examples, you know. It’s that old show don’t tell rule in writing.’

Jo took a very deep breath, and started to talk. It felt very surreal talking about a person who didn’t even exist outside of her mind and some words on a page, but she found, as she spoke, she knew Kate much more than she thought she did, and that she did, in fact, see her as utterly real. It was as if she was talking about an old friend, someone as intrinsic to her as Erin or Noah.

As Ewan probed and pushed about Kate, about her decisions through the story, Jo relaxed more and more into it. She took notes. Ewan took notes too. They chatted until one bottle of wine turned into two. They chatted over dinner, and until Jo’s eyes started to droop – her stomach, head and heart full. She felt as if she had been challenged, but as if she had learned so much.

‘One more for the road?’ Ewan asked.

‘I’m not sure I should,’ Jo replied. She already had more to drink than she would normally have.

‘Ah, it won’t hurt,’ Ewan said. ‘A wee dram of whisky?’

‘Honestly, I won’t. I want to be on the ball tomorrow. What’s the plan?’

‘I thought we could workshop a bit more in the morning,’ he said. ‘Make the most of our last day. Then I’ll drop you back to Derry. I’m only sorry I didn’t book to stay for longer.’