The face mask was just one step in Jo’s plan to have her feeling her best when she met Ewan so that she would exude a confidence she most certainly didn’t feel. She’d already had a long soak in the bath, defuzzed a significant amount of hair from her body (not quite porn-star levels of hair removal, but early-days-in-a-passionate-relationship levels for definite). She had rubbed her most luxurious body cream into her skin, and her hair was currently deep conditioning and wrapped in a towel. It wasn’t quite the full-on pampering she had planned, but she’d had to cut her cloth after overspending on the new outfit to wear.

‘Why are you doing all that?’ Clara asked, cutting through her thoughts.

Jo looked at her, thinking how unbearably cute she was as she sat wearing a pair of white cotton pyjamas with tiny unicorns dancing across them in pale shades of pink and lilac. Her feet were clad in pink furry slippers, from the top of which bunny ears stood to attention. Her hair was silky soft, in smooth curls. In fact, her hair was exactly how Jo would like her own to look after this deep-conditioning treatment. She feared, however, that it might just look as if she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket.

‘Well,’ Jo told her. ‘Sometimes it’s nice to pamper yourself. I just want to make my skin feel nice and soft and make myself look beautiful.’

‘But you are beautiful,’ Clara said, with the sincerity that only a six-year-old can possess, and Jo’s heart melted just a little.

‘Well, thank you very much. You are very beautiful too. But because I’m a little bit older, sometimes I need a little more help to get there.’

Clara screwed her face up again, her brow furrowed. ‘But your face is your face. You can’t change it.’ She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.

It was pretty faultless logic as far as these things go. ‘Well, that’s true enough. But still, it’s just something some of us like to do, especially if we have something important or extra fun planned, like going to a party or a wedding. You know, like when you put on your favourite dress when you went to Lucy’s birthday party?’

‘Are you going to a birthday party?’ Clara asked, eyebrows raised. ‘Can I come too? Please! Please, please, please!’

Jo shook her head slowly. ‘No, darling, I’m not going to a party. I’m going to help Libby at the shop tomorrow and she is having a special visitor who I want to talk to about the stories I write.’

‘Does he write stories too?’

‘He does,’ Jo said. ‘And he might be able to help me.’

‘Like you help me with my homework sometimes?’ Clara asked.

‘Exactly like that.’ Jo smiled. It seemed a simple enough explanation for a six-year-old to wrap her head around.