‘This is about your writing, not your clothes,’ Jo told herself. She pulled a capped-sleeved floral summer dress, in bright yellow with a little bluebird motif, from the back of the wardrobe and put it in her case, along with her bright white, hardly worn Converse which she saved for summer months. If she slathered on some of that slow-building, self-tanning moisturiser on her legs, it might even make for a good look for her. Next, she packed a few of her nicer T-shirts and a black smock top which looked amazing with skinny jeans and her wedged sandals.

Wishing she had a proper laptop bag, she folded her ancient laptop in a towel and packed it, along with the battery charger, which needed to be permanently attached to it at all times. She grabbed a few pens from her dressing table, and two of the notebooks she kept beside her bed. Those were the sum total of her writing tools, but, she told herself, that didn’t matter. Even without the latest and most fancy MacBook, specialist writing software or expensive moleskin notebooks, she had written something that Ewan McLachlan had loved so much he’d offered to mentor her.

Ewan McLachlan, who Google had told her, had sold fifteen million books across twelve different counties. Ewan McLachlan who had won almost every major crime writing award that there was to be won in the UK. Ewan McLachlan who, according to Google again, was single but the father to one child. (She’d had to search all the details she could find about him, after all.) Ewan McLachlan who smouldered in black and white in the author picture on his publisher’s page but who smouldered even more in real life, not that it mattered of course, because this was purely and entirely a professional trip.

Zipping up her bag, she headed out of her room. Her mother looked more than a little green around the gills as Jo carried her case downstairs. ‘Never again, Jo. That’s a promise,’ she said, but there was a hint of a smile on her face all the same.

‘Tell that to Auntie Mags,’ Jo smiled back. ‘Look, I’ll probably be gone by the time you make it back from dropping Clara at school. I’ll keep in touch and, if you need me, sure, I’m only in Donegal. I can be home in an hour or so.’ A pang of love for Clara rose in her, closely followed by a wave of guilt that she was leaving her, even for a short trip.

‘Darling, I love you, so believe me when I say that we won’t need you this weekend. There is nothing that could possibly happen that would be more important than you getting this time to work towards your dream. Miss Clara and I will be just fine. I’ve raised kids before, you know. Clara’s hardly a handful. Unlike some others were…’