She shrugs. No way is she going to tell him about the flow of money through her bank account. That the more she earns, the more she spends, mostly on stuff she doesn’t even need. Scented candles at a hundred dollars a pop. Handbags, even though she doesn’t go anywhere. New coats, jackets, trousers, cashmere jumpers every season, which get worn to the coffee shop or Magda’s house, maybe even a restaurant or bar during the daytime, and that’s it. The stuff with tags still on that hangs in her closets because there aren’t enough outfit changes in the day, or the car she has in the drive with less than ten thousand miles racked up in two years. Not to mention the soft furnishings, the smoothie machines and coffee makers in the kitchen. She knows it’s a problem and has been for years: she doesn’t feel worthy of the money, so she spends it on physical manifestations of stuff. Stuff she can look at, a physical thing that acts as an object to represent that she’s doing well. She doesn’t feel like she’s doing well at anything. So she’s sold a few hundred thousand books – so what? What does that mean when she goes to bed alone, when she’s spineless in the face of life because she’s tired? Evie is so, so tired. Yeah, fine, she cashes the cheques, she pays the care home monthly – most of the time – and then she gets rid of the money as fast as she can. It’s a compulsion. A stupid, embarrassing compulsion, and he’s just not going to understand, is he? Absolutely no way. And she’s promised herself that the next big cheque won’t go to her mom’s nursing home to cover a month, or the next six months. Her spending is getting so bad that since May she’s not been able to pay them at all. She’s going to pay them for the next ten years when the movie money comes in, to avoid any problems. She’s getting more and more reckless, and nobody has any idea because she has a Canada Goose jacket and a fancy watch and nice nails.

‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘The book?’

‘Right, yes. Hold on.’

Duke busies himself finding the novel he wanted to lend her, and Evie idly takes in the rest of the room. And then she sees it, poking out of the pile of papers. It’s an information sheet. And it’s about her.

She moves two paces to the left to angle her body away from Duke and tugs the paper out the tiniest amount more. It’s her name, a general bio, and what looks like facts and figures for her books. It takes a breath, but then the penny drops: she had it right all along. None of this is real.