‘Well, give it a chance. We’ve only just left Salzburg,’ Matty mumbled, not looking up from her phone.

Clover shifted in her seat, refusing to acknowledge the nerves that were tickling her fingertips and toes and making her tummy fizz. She had that feeling she always got when standing at the top of a skyscraper, a sudden fear that she couldn’t trust herself not to jump. But this wasn’t vertigo and there was nothing imagined about the tension that had crackled through the six months of email correspondence for the pitch, which had come from an idea, born of a promise.

Neither Johnny nor Matty had believed her when she’d unveiled her proposal on her return from California. They’d expected her to come back with an Oscar, not a plan for ‘career suicide’. First they’d laughed, then they’d laughed harder. Only her paleness had convinced them she meant every word. Liam too, sitting opposite her in their usual chairs in Soho House, had looked at her as though he couldn’t decide if the proposal was a stroke of genius or entirely mad. Couldn’t it be both? she had argued.

Crudely put – in commercial terms – the story had moved on. Pipe Dreams had been about life after Cory’s injury: loss of identity, loss of health, loss of the dream. Now they had life after Cory’s death. Only, she didn’t want to come at it from the same angle as before. This wasn’t a sequel. She wanted to pivot a full one-eighty and examine how this played out for the antagonist of the story. How did Kit Foley live with what he’d done? How did someone like him sleep at night?

People had loved Cory precisely because he was forever the underdog, always the groomsman, never the groom. They saw themselves in him, especially when pitched against a competitor who wasn’t just a supreme athlete – Foley had had every advantage: he was six foot one to Cory’s five nine; his famously pale blue eyes and chiselled bone structure had made him a second fortune as the sponsorships rolled in; he had seduced a trail of Hollywood actresses. In short, Foley had been winning his whole life. He’d had no idea what it was like to lose – until now.