‘I don’t understand why anyone would want to do this to you of all people.’ He pulled me close into a hug, and as my face sank against his chest, my steely spine dissolved into mush.

‘I was a writer.’ I pulled myself upright again, heart splintering at the swirl of compassion and anger in his eyes. ‘Every journalist gets hate mail. I’ve had plenty of nasty comments on social media over the years, people taking an irrational dislike to me, or offended by something I’ve said.’

‘Eleanor, someone packaged up a load of bees into a box. This is way beyond a snarky tweet. And if someone went to the trouble to find out both your birthday and your current address, that’s not a passing dislike. It’s a stalker.’

I blew out a shaky sigh. ‘You’re not really making me feel any better, here.’

‘I’m sorry, but I’d rather you took this seriously and ensured you were safe than tried to cheer you up by dismissing something potentially dangerous as nothing to worry about.’

‘I am taking it seriously.’

‘We need to call the police.’

I shook my head frantically, trying to come up with a good reason why not. ‘It’s just a parcel of bees. I don’t think we need to do anything drastic. Like I said, this is par for the course for a journalist. Especially a reviewer. And I’m not sure they can do anything, even if they had the time and resources to bother.’

‘They could start by scouring the area for people covered in unexplained bee stings.’

‘Look, it’s my birthday, we’ve had a lovely day up until this. If we call the police now I might have to stay in and talk to them, miss my birthday night out with Becky and Alice. They’ve told me to put on my sparkle. I can’t remember the last time I did that. Please can we leave it for today, see how we feel in the morning once the shock’s settled? I’ll have a proper think about who it might be. Go over my old social media accounts, see if there’s any helpful clues there. And you can talk to Ziva, give her a chance to check out the hives.’

He huffed, rubbing at his scar. ‘I need to pick up Hope now anyway.’ Looking at me, he narrowed his eyes. ‘But we’re calling them tomorrow. This needs dealing with properly.’

He grabbed his keys and left, leaving me to sweep the tiny corpses back into the box before changing into the closest item I had in my wardrobe that resembled sparkle.

Needless to say, I was not feeling sparkly.

29

It was beyond late by the time I tumbled out of the taxi, waving a groggy farewell to Becky and Alice as they hooted and hollered their happy birthdays at me one final time.

We’d had a night full of food, fun and utterly fabulous friendship, and while deciding to drown my rampant terror with cocktails was probably not a sensible idea, it had been a successful one.