‘But you can’t . . . Surely you don’t want to have this in print,’ Frankie said uneasily, fearing as she spoke the words that oh yes, actually he did. ‘I mean, it’s all a bit . . . airing dirty laundry in public. Don’t you think?’

‘Exactly,’ Craig said, sounding pleased.

‘And given that she’s already said how unhappy she is that you’re doing the column at all—’

‘Then my column is a clear and definitive two-fingers up to what she wants,’ Craig replied. ‘Yes. As intended.’

Frankie sighed. ‘Craig, I don’t think there’s any need to be so combative about this,’ she began saying, just as Fergus pelted into the room clutching a plastic dinosaur in each hand. He grabbed the oven glove from the radiator, wrapped it around his neck like a scarf and ran out again. It was Monday morning and their first day without any childcare until September; give it fifteen minutes and he would be saying he was bored and had nothing to do. In the meantime, Frankie needed to talk her partner down from his hostile high-horse position. ‘I can’t see Vicki going along with this, either,’ she said, citing the name of his editor as back-up. ‘Or the readers. Please, Craig. Write something nice. Don’t use this as a means of stoking the fire.’

Her phone started ringing, just as Fergus charged back into the room, still wearing the oven glove, then flopped down dramatically onto the floor and announced, ‘I’m bored.’

‘Dad will play with you,’ Frankie told him, seeing her agent’s name onscreen and feeling a pinprick of guilt that she wasn’t doing any work. ‘Hi, Constance,’ she said, leaving the room before anyone tried to stop her. If Constance was ringing up to check on how Frankie was progressing with the dragon sketches, she was just going to have to lie, she decided with a grimace. And then stay up all night to catch up on herself. ‘How are you? Good weekend?’

‘I’m very well, thank you, darling,’ said Constance. Constance was quite possibly the most glamorous person Frankie had ever met. She had silver-grey hair, cropped very close to her head, and liked to drape herself in jewel-coloured velvet pashminas and statement necklaces. If you didn’t notice her for her dress sense, you would know her for her loud cut-glass voice, and her habit of saying exactly what she thought, whether you wanted to hear it or not. ‘Now then, I’m ringing because I had rather a strange call on Friday afternoon,’ she went on in her usual theatrical style. ‘Probably some lunatic – we do get our fair share of them – but I thought I’d run it past you, all the same.’