“I’m sure they’re too excited to care.” I pushed a watermelon slab into my mouth to stop me making a sarcastic comment.

“Shall I show you the stage setup? I know you’ve done this loads of times before, but can’t hurt to go over it, can it?”

I sensed it was to ease her nerves rather than mine, but nodded, and followed her scuttling through the corridors out onto the giant empty stage. Stacy was too big for her events to fit into a bookshop, so they’d hired out a theater. Gwen and I stepped out into the blinding lights, while a technician paced around the stage, clapping at different moments. A jolt of nerves went through me. So many people would be witnessing this damn carry-on. Stacy’s publishers had done a paid partnership with Gah!, the website I worked at, and wanted me to chair the event to give her autobiography credibility. From what I’d been told, we couldn’t afford to turn down the advertorial, and I was stuck pretending to like a book I’d thrown across the room seven times the previous weekend.

“It’s dangerous and outdated...nonsense. I don’t think Stacy’s ever met a psychologist,” I’d told Ben—both before and after lunch, and twice more before bedtime. “And yet Gah! are splashing it all over their home page for a whole week.”

He’d laughed and lowered his lips onto my eyelids. “And just think, out of all the chair people they could’ve chosen to peddle such misinformation, they chose you.”

I stared out at the ocean of space. “That’s a lot of seats,” I said.

Gwen grinned. “It sold out in an hour, did I tell you? One of the quickest we’ve had. Do direct them to buy the book at the beginning and the end. So many people forget.”

“Of course.”

“Shall I show you the Gah! stand?”

“The what?”

She led me past a side table dwarfed by the wobbling piles of Stacy’s book. Hulking hot-pink hardbacks towered toward the high ceiling, and, just past it, was a sorrowful-looking table with the Gah! banner above it, loaded with some promotional key rings I doubted anyone wanted.

“That’s your table. It will be nice for you to be able to chat to people afterward.”

“Oh great,” I said, immediately furious at my editor, Derek, for not telling me about this part of the evening. Nobody mentioned me having to loiter around some stand afterward.

Gwen’s phone went and she leaped on it, her eyes wide with relief. “Stacy’s here,” she told me, as if Beyoncé had just arrived. “Quick.”