Firstly, my editor Rebecca Hilsdon, who has been a champion of The Lock In from the beginning. As soon as we met (on Zoom, natch) I knew I wanted to work with you. Thank you for polishing my rough cut, getting my (weird) jokes, and for all of your brilliant ideas, enthusiasm and kindness throughout. Thank you to Zana Chaka for your quiet insight and very hard work, and to Clare Bowron for being a brilliant and patient editor, not to mention for making sure I removed my approximately 14,000 uses of the word ‘nodded’ from the first few drafts. Thank you also to Shan Morley Jones and Emma Henderson, both of whom were kind and friendly voices at the end of an email, and demystified the (daunting!) process of copy-editing.

Sriya Varadharajan, brainstorming with you has been joyous and I hope by the time you read this we have actually met in person, and Lucy Hall, thank you for devising such a brilliant and fun marketing campaign.

As with almost everything in my entire life (apart from the two years before any of them were born), I relied on three people while writing The Lock In. Thank you to my brother, Toby, for all the Lockdown 1.0 walks during which you helped me to untangle all the inconsistencies in my plot, and to my sister Georgia for being my first, enthusiastic reader. Last in birth order but never least, Molly, you were a cheerleader at the end of the phone/WhatsApp group/Zoom call. Mum and Dad, thank you for buying me all those books and telling the whole family to buy this one.

Karen, Lucy and Emma (aka, The Heritage WAGs), thank you for your endless support (but, mainly, the lols). I so hope we get to work together again. (First, wine in Kaz’s garden.)

I definitely also owe a debt to many housemates for inspiring several of the anecdotes in here, and – strictly speaking – a few landlords, but most of them still owe me part of a security deposit, so let’s call it quits. A special declaration of love to Matt and Emma: the years we lived together were some of my favourites of our twenties, even if I did a really good impression of someone having A Personal Crisis a lot of the time. (Sorry I was so messy.)

And, lastly, thank you to Samuel – who makes everything shinier. I couldn’t have done this last mad year without you.

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1

Shortly after her twenty-ninth birthday, Anya Mackie’s life fell apart in three significant ways.

The first disaster was her love life. Anya was fairly certain there wasn’t a more unceremonious place to be dumped than a Shell garage, just outside Bishopbriggs, on your way home from lunch at your mother-in-law’s.