The day they met she was wearing a white pleated skirt and a yellow shirt, her favourite bright green belt pulled tight at the waist. Her long dark hair was plaited on either side of her face and she was smiling at the boy called William who’d offered to buy her a drink. It was nearly two years after she’d seen Freida give that lecture in London, a lecture that had changed her life, offered a glimpse of a new way for women to live. And just before she started at university – the beginnings of her own new life that Freida had made possible.

‘I don’t need you to buy me a drink,’ she said to Will, full of confidence. It was the first conversation between them, and she knew as soon as the words were spoken that she was flirting. He looked pleased.

‘What is it that you need, then?’ he said.

Holly shrugged, crossed her legs, looked away. ‘I don’t need a single thing.’

She liked his eyes, though, his expression – suddenly she wanted to know exactly what he thought about everything. And to tell him exactly what she thought, too.

‘But I’d like to buy you a drink, instead,’ she said.

He grinned. His glasses were too big for his face. Big frames, like Buddy Holly. Dimples when he smiled. And he wasn’t scared, or surprised, or taken aback by her.

Holly was leaning her head against the glass, pressing her face towards the sea she could glimpse now through the woods, and she was reaching out her hand to touch Will’s knee, both of them talking excitedly, neither of them able to stop touching each other, to let go of that contact that fizzed and sparked like ideas. She had never met a man so open to ideas in her life – and he wanted to try things, wanted to change things. He welcomed new ideas as fervently as her parents clung to the old ones.

‘They’re paying for me to go to university,’ she said. ‘Full scholarship. Living costs. Everything.’ She wouldn’t even have been able to afford to rent a flat without the scholarship money – she’d still be living in her parents’ estate, probably. Going nowhere. The money from FullLife had changed everything.

‘And you’ll be involved with what they’re doing?’

She grinned. ‘I’m going to be living a whole new kind of life.’

With a whole new kind of man, she thought, imagining already that Will could be the one to share it with her. She couldn’t wait to tell Freida about him.