She’s too much the consummate professional to let her distraction show while they’re on-air, but a low-level anxiety gnaws at her all morning. She’s planned her escape from Felix down to the last detail, but so much depends on whether Millie Downton will help her. She’s grateful for the swimsuit segment: once the parade of women in bikinis comes on set, Brendan’s leering misogyny ensures the programme descends into organised chaos, which masks her inattentiveness.

After the show, she joins the production team in the editor’s office for the usual post-mortem. To her disgust and Brendan’s smug delight, three-quarters of the morning’s viewer calls and emails are to ask for more shots of his waxed abs. One of the feature producers suggests sending him out to various scenic locations to recreate famous ‘knicker-wetting’ moments: scything in a field like Poldark’s Aidan Turner, or emerging from a lake like Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice.

Stacey excuses herself from the meeting and leaves, texting her agent as she takes the lift down to reception where her car is waiting. She’s anchored the Morning Express Show for more than a decade. It’s time the network gave her a show of her own, something that’ll give her a chance to show off her serious journalistic chops. She knows her own worth: she’s won the People’s Choice Award for Best Presenter eight years running.

She’s grateful Felix is at work when her driver drops her off at home. She needs time to sort through all their joint paperwork, and make sure she has everything she needs before she pulls the trigger on her plan.

And then her phone beeps with an incoming message from her husband just as she opens the front door:

I’m waiting for you upstairs.

chapter 23

millie

I’m running along the Embankment when Stacey phones me. Exercise helps me come down from my surgical high: I’ve just finished a fourteen-hour coronary artery bypass graft on a fifty-six-year-old woman. The CAPG itself was successful, but my patient suffered a number of complications on the table which tripled my time in theatre. She’ll survive the surgery, but I doubt she’ll live to draw her pension: she’s four stone overweight, and the obese don’t generally make old bones. There’s nothing like slicing down through several inches of yellow adipose tissue to make you want to hit the pavement and work up a sweat.

‘I shouldn’t be ringing you,’ Stacey says. ‘But I didn’t know who else to call.’