The rush of finding the rhythm of a story is the reason why Evie keeps doing what she does. She won’t ever be on social media documenting her life, or out on tour going from bookshop to bookshop, nice as she now knows it would be to meet her readers. Because that isn’t this: creating, writing, going in hard and deep on a story that feels like a compulsion to get out of her head and through her fingers onto the screen. That is her offering to this world, that is how she makes sense of things. When the café closes and she’s forced to down tools and head back to the hotel to dump her bag, her mind is racing, her blood positively humming with creativity – it’s something she’s not felt in several books. She’s always written what she cares about, but she hasn’t felt this specific feeling for a while, and now it is back she wants to hang on to it for as long as possible.

In fact, when she gets back to her room, she sits at the small table by the window and decides to write one thousand more words, because she can. She’s not even sure that this book is a romance, like she’s done before: there’s something else she wants to say, something about a woman taking control of her narrative, taking it back from the outsourcing she has been doing, a thing that has been keeping her small. What happens, she thinks to herself as she folds one leg up under her, biting her lip and using the elastic on her wrist to tie up her hair, when a woman finally gets tired of her own bull? She almost can’t bear it. She’s asked herself the question, and now the character of Petra Egerton is going to seek out the answer.

It’s 11 p.m. when she finishes. In the space of eleven hours, she’s written almost ten thousand words – a tenth of a new book. Ten thousand words is often her own personal barometer of the tone of a manuscript, and so when she finally pauses and that feeling is still there – that light-headedness, that adrenaline – she knows this is it. The other idea has to go out of the window, even though it’s almost finished. This new one is exactly the story she wants to tell.

She gets up to pee and stretches a little. There’s a masseuse she sees back home in Utah who has never been able to fully get the knots out of her shoulders because Evie never fully commits to seeing her often enough. But she’s been given exercises to do, to help, and so she swings her arms loosely from one side to the other, and then puts her hands on her shoulders and circles forwards, then back.