‘I haven’t thought about that for a while,’ he said. ‘When I was about nineteen, I went on holiday with my family and I had just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye. We were in this remote place in the Lake District, and it was raining, and I was bored. My mum had a copy of Emma and I reluctantly decided to read it.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘But I was captivated by it.’

I smiled too. ‘I love her books so much.’

‘I enjoyed it even more than The Catcher in the Rye. I liked the humour and the irony, the way Austen created these characters I could absolutely see in my mind, and the fact that they made mistakes but things worked out in the end. Which is something I think I use in my books.’ He paused and glanced at me. I nodded because he absolutely wrote very human characters that you believed in and rooted for. ‘When I told my mum I had loved it, she said it was her favourite book because she had been reading it when she met my father. Anyway, I was inspired and after that, I found myself choosing romantic stories over everything else. That summer was long and I ended up starting to write my own stories. It was ten years until I’d get a book published but that summer shaped me as a reader and a writer, and started me on that journey.’ Jake looked a little bit startled then. ‘Sorry for such a long speech.’

‘No, I liked it.’ I knew then he wasn’t lying about enjoying love stories. I could see it in his smile, in his eyes, the wistful look as he thought back to that summer. Whatever happened to make him say those things about romance books, it wasn’t because he didn’t love them any more. ‘I hope you get to carry on writing books, Jake. I think the world would be a worse place without them.’

‘That means more to me than you could know.’

We smiled at one another, and Davis Mulberry’s warnings about Jake faded to the back of my mind.

We reached Brooklyn then and the taxi dropped us off so we could walk up to the bridge and start crossing it. We started at the point where the suspension cables were anchored. I sucked in an awed breath to be walking above the traffic, feeling like I could almost touch the cloudless, bright blue sky. Ahead, I could see the Brooklyn Tower granite archway which I recognised from scenes of the bridge I had seen; it looked like a cathedral opening. Behind the arches and cables, in the distance, was the incredible Manhattan skyline. Below us, cars sped on by like they had no idea we were up here.

I felt all at once tiny and on top of the world too. It was overwhelming.