Why had Pip’s adventures been left unfinished? It seemed that the most recently published book had ended on a cliffhanger, with the girl lost and wounded in the Vale of Shadows. It seemed heartless to leave her stuck there, and Brody was anything but heartless.

Why did he stop? Was it to do with his wife’s death? Was that why he was hidden away in a cottage in the middle of nowhere? How did it all fit in?

It was a double-edged sword reading these books. On the one hand, she felt that connection to Brody even more strongly. Another layer to him – a really important one – that had previously been invisible to her had been revealed. She felt as if she’d been able to lift the top of his skull and peer inside his head, allowed to see secret things that no one else saw, which was ridiculous, since anyone could walk into a bookshop and read exactly the same words, but somehow this was different. This was her and Brody.

The downside was that now her curiosity about him had more than doubled. The urge to dig for answers about his past was almost overwhelming. She kept finding herself on Google, poised to type his name into the search box, and having to make herself pull her hands away from the keyboard and fold them in her lap.

They’d talked a couple of times since she’d started reading his books, but not since she’d started the third, almost five days ago. She kept meaning to call, but it felt weird having this new information about him, information he wasn’t aware she’d found. Their relationship had always been on a ‘need to know’ basis, and she hadn’t realized how simple that had made things. They’d been able to talk without the fear of overstepping boundaries, of taking a wrong turn and saying something they’d regret later.

Despite her discomfort, she couldn’t put off phoning him forever, because he might guess something was up. Come on, Anna. Just do it. Holding her breath, she dialled his number. If he was asleep, she’d just leave a breezy message and try again tomorrow.

However, Brody answered immediately. Anna had the oddest feeling that he’d been waiting for his phone to ring, that he’d had the same sense that she had, that if they didn’t talk tonight, it would feel as if there’d been too much of a gap in the usual rhythm of their conversations.

Anna was desperate to ask him about his books, to find out why he’d stopped writing them, but she knew it wouldn’t be the right thing to blurt it all out straight away. She needed to tread carefully, so instead she just told him she’d been up late reading – without mentioning authors and titles. It turned out that Brody, too, had been kept up, reading a thriller he’d simply had to get to the end of.

As they talked, Anna couldn’t help noticing that the man she was talking to now was very different from the man who had written Pip’s story. Something was missing. The man who had written about dragons and magic rivers, about snowflakes that could speak, was a man confident of all the delightful possibilities life could bring, who knew what hope was.