She was rude last night, standoffish. Duke isn’t used to people giving him a hard time, which is something else he hadn’t realised until after she’d walked away from him at the meeting. He couldn’t stand to think she didn’t like him, somehow. He wanted to impress her. When he’d read No Stopping Us, her book about two terminally ill patients who meet at a cancer support group and decide to make a bucket list of things to do before they die – falling in love along the way – he’d laughed out loud and shed actual tears. That had never happened with a book before. He’s been low-key obsessed with Evie Bird’s work ever since, and that she’s here, on set, is something he’s been so excited about. He wants to grab a drink and ask her a million questions. Duke has been fiddling about with a novel of his own, actually, although it’s not very good. Anyway, he’s hoping for a do-over. Maybe she was jet-lagged yesterday, or overwhelmed. We all have bad days.

Duke pretends to scroll on his phone from where he’s stood by the cast and crew bus, bundled up in a coat and Ugg boots and a woolly hat with a bobble on top, looking up surreptitiously to see she’s obviously choosing to hang back so that she doesn’t have to talk to anyone – he watches the calculation in her eyes, how she sweeps over who is stood where, their proximity to the vehicle, and then casting back to see who is coming out of the door just at her shoulder. His feet start moving in her direction before his head has computed any sort of plan. He looks right at her: hair loose but tucked into a checked cashmere scarf, her breath making clouds as she exhales into the cold. It really was you on the bridge yesterday, he thinks, her expression suddenly familiar.

Evie looks up, and he points to the hotel door, opens his mouth and says, barely forming words: ‘I just forgot my …’ He trails off, cursing himself inwardly. Why is he acting so nervous? This doesn’t make sense. He hasn’t forgotten anything. He wants her!

In response, Evie lifts her eyebrows as if to say, sure, whatever, and looks back down. Duke grabs the door as the lighting director comes through it from the other side, ostensibly to head inside for the pretend thing he’s ‘forgotten’ before he changes his mind.

‘That’s a lie,’ he finds himself admitting (what is his problem?!), and she looks up again. Her eyes – brown, very dark brown – shift from side to side, like she’s confused as to who he is talking to. Okay then. She’s going to continue to make this hard. Got it, thinks Duke. But I can overcome this.