My phone beeps with a text.

‘Hang on, Mills.’ I pull the phone away from my ear and squint down at the message.

Urgent! Need you to cover an exhibition tomorrow night at Le Voltage. 7 pm. Brand new series. Due Friday 10 am. Make sure you network! H.

That H stands for Hyacinth, my new boss. This new job is the reason I moved to Paris. I put the phone back to my ear. ‘Can I call you back later? I’ve just got to deal with a work thing.’

‘Okay, sure. Big love.’

And then we hang up and I stand there rereading Hyacinth’s message. An exhibition tomorrow night. Due Friday.

Shit.

Because tomorrow is already Thursday.

That doesn’t leave me much time to write something impressive. And it needs to be impressive. Uber-impressive. Because this will be only my third story for The Paris Observer. My first was a review of a gypsy-jazz band. I thought my piece was amazing but it only got a depressing twelve likes and two shares. And my second, a walking tour of Paris’s street art, is still on Hyacinth’s desk awaiting the ‘constructive notes’ she told me were coming. Mine’s an entry-level position and they’re easing me in slowly, but if I don’t hit it out of the park soon, Hyacinth is going to start wondering why the hell she hired me. And I can’t afford to screw this up. I’ve worked too hard to get here.

Because after Harrison left me, let’s just say things got a lot worse before they got better. It didn’t matter what I drank, who I fucked or what colour I dyed my hair, every time my lungs moved they hit my newly returned and wounded heart. It wasn’t so much losing Harrison that haunted me; it was losing myself. I’d let this happen to me. I’d ignored everything I’d seen happen to my mother and let him in anyway. And he’d done exactly what I was scared of: taken what he could get from me and left.

In short, I’d betrayed myself.

And then, one very ordinary day that wasn’t marked by anything I can recall now, I was sitting at my desk, pretending to put together a pamphlet for work, when something truly miraculous happened.

I started to write instead.

I hadn’t written anything other than marketing copy in eight long years. But as I typed out the first line – Why I hate John Lennon – a light flicked on inside of me. And I knew: this was it. This was how I could make things right. Yes, I had given up my own dreams in favour of his, but I was only twenty-eight and I could still become a writer. And so every night that’s what I did: I wrote. I wrote rave reviews about the music Harrison hated. I wrote about the art I now knew so much about thanks to his tours. I wrote about fitness trends, movies, intermittent fasting, music, sex, mascara and had a recurring micro-column inspired by my love of true crime podcasts called: ‘How not to get murdered’. I even wrote about tax time once. Basically, I’d write about anything and everything as long as it added to my portfolio and took me one step closer to my dreams. And I did it largely for free.