A sweet girl, only eighteen, Jenni was eager to please and pleasant with the customers. She had a quirky dress sense, favouring obscure hats, mismatched prints and layers of bracelets on her tiny wrists that clattered as she moved. She had big, red-framed glasses that magnified her brown eyes and made her look not unlike the owl on the shop signage, and she always had her nose in a book. It was like she had walked out of a Beatrix Potter story, but she was unapologetic about her chosen style and Helen envied her for that. Today Jenni had been dressed in double animal print, but with a cheetah print on the top and zebra print on the bottom, it went against the laws of nature. When she walked, it looked like her jacket was trying to eat her skirt.

Helen sat at her desk in her attic. Sharon was still talking down the phone. “It’s just too similar to the last plot. There’s no… surprises.”

Helen leaned back in her chair, which groaned in response. Secretly Helen agreed with Sharon. She’d known when she was writing it how flat it was. But it annoyed her to hear Sharon say it out loud. It made the clawing panic that sometimes inched its long, bony fingers around her throat tighten its grip just a little bit more.

Is this it? Have I finally run out of ideas? Will they all see I am a fake after all?

Imposter syndrome at its best.

Helen wrote romance novels. Bodice rippers. Hence Hugh’s relief that she wrote under a pseudonym. He would hate it if the school committee knew his wife was behind such steamy titles. Nothing too risqué – they weren’t on the Fifty Shades level of smut – but there were plenty of heaving chests and quivering limbs, mixed with a good dollop of innuendo. There was nothing literary about the books, but she found it liberating to write the kind of things that would never happen to her, to create characters with life and vigour, all under a cloak of secrecy. And if readers kept buying them, she would keep writing them. Villains and heroes, brooding, misunderstood men and empowered, feisty women, taking what they want from whomever they choose.

Her real life may be tedious domestic humdrum at best, but her alter ego got to have a lot of fun.

“Should I just go back to the drawing board?” she said to Sharon.

Sharon sighed down the phone. “Maybe. Have you had any other ideas?”

Helen thought about the photograph, thought about how long that story had been hidden – and how freeing it would be to finally let it out, tell it her way. “What if I said I did? But it would be completely different to what I’ve written before?”

“Oh? What is it about?” Helen could picture Sharon sitting higher in her seat.