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T he weekend passed in a blur of broken sleep, catastrophizing and hiding from Mark the fact that there was a very real chance her life was about to spectacularly implode.

He made that easy to do by waking up on Saturday morning seized by the idea of turning their tiny, windowless storage room into an office. This necessitated redistributing all the crap they’d thrown in there over the past year between the bins, the nearest charity shop and other places in the apartment, of which there were very few; repainting the space with a half-can of Magnolia he’d found in his parents’ garage; and trawling through local online adverts looking for free-to-a-good-home desks and chairs. Emily had indulged his hare-brained scheme in part because she recognized this particular brand of self-delusion. If I just had that pen … Or notebook. Software. Coffee machine. New iMac. Standing desk. Then the magic lock will click open and the words will flow!

It was a bonus that this activity kept him occupied while she curled up on the couch for forty-eight hours and thought of terrible things. Monday morning approached like a freight train and, up ahead, she was tied to the tracks. If only she knew what the meeting was about. She’d thought she might have got a little more info when she replied to tell Beth yes – because Alice was right, she had to attend – but there wasn’t much to glean from Great! Fitzwilliam Hotel at 11:00a.m. good for you? She’d gone back with Perfect. Do you need anything from me in advance? but hadn’t got an answer.

All too soon, it was Monday morning and the collision was mere moments away.

Emily entered the Fitzwilliam’s lobby dulled by insufficient sleep, hollow from a lack of appetite and thrumming with nerves. There was a dampness at the back of her neck and under her arms, and she was convinced her face was puce. She was scanning for a sign promising toilets when a voice said, ‘Emily?’

A thirty-something woman had popped out from a little nook behind the bell stand. Her blonde hair shone in a razor-sharp bob, just like it did in the professional headshot Emily had found on the Morningstar website, and she glowed with the kind of healthy, outdoorsy tan you couldn’t fake.

They exchanged smiles and shook hands, Emily acutely aware of her damp palm.

‘We’re just in here,’ Beth said.

The nook was book-lined and narrow, with two couches facing each other over a table; if there’d been a window on the rear wall playing landscapes rushing past, it could’ve passed for a compartment on a luxurious train carriage.

Emily was still processing the we when she saw that another, older woman was already seated there, in a spot that had previously hidden her from view.

‘Carolyn,’ she said, raising an arm to shake hands but not rising from her seat. She wasn’t smiling. ‘Hello.’

‘Can we get you something to drink before we begin?’ Beth asked. ‘Coffee? Tea?’

‘A coffee would be great,’ Emily answered on a delay, distracted by trying to remember where she’d seen Carolyn before. She thought it was on the same page of the Morningstar website where she’d seen Beth’s professional bio, only at the top because Carolyn was …

Shit .

Carolyn was Morningstar’s publishing director. Beth’s boss.

That couldn’t be good.

A waiter was summoned and three coffees were ordered. The women made stilted small talk – about how warm the weather was, how busy Grafton Street was, how lovely the hotel was – until their drinks arrived, along with three glasses of iced water.

Emily immediately picked hers up and gulped a third of it down.

‘So,’ Beth said, clasping her hands together. ‘Are you writing?’

She said she was, nodding vigorously. She explained that the success of The Witness had messed with her head a little bit and that it had taken her a while to reset. She mentioned the pandemic, and having to completely go back to the drawing board once or twice, and life being so busy and not being able to see the forest for the trees and Difficult Second Album Syndrome, and then she saw Carolyn pressing her lips together and realized she was babbling, that she’d been babbling from the moment she opened her mouth, so she said, ‘But things are going well now,’ and abruptly stopped.

‘Great,’ Beth said. ‘Good to hear. So … I believe there’s a book outstanding on your contract?’

‘Um, yeah. Yes. It was a two-book deal.’

‘And your agent is …?’

‘Lynne Reilly.’ Emily shifted in her seat. ‘Well, she was my agent. She’s retired now.’

‘So who is . . ?’

‘Well, ah, Lynne worked alone and I’ve just been focusing on finishing the book.’ Emily could feel the red on her face crawling down her neck and spreading across her chest, which only made the spread happen faster. ‘I don’t have an agent, technically. Not at the moment.’

‘Of course.’ Beth smiled kindly. ‘The thing is, Emily, well, it’s just been so long. Three years past the original delivery date, by my estimation. Now, we totally understand that this is a creative process and things don’t always go as planned, and if you’d needed an extra year or even two, I’m sure my predecessors could’ve worked with you on that. But we find ourselves in a situation where so much time has passed, well, the problem is that Morningstar itself has changed.’

Emily didn’t know what that meant.

‘We all loved The Witness ,’ Beth continued, ‘and we were immensely proud to publish it. But since then, we’ve really moved our focus onto non-fiction so, you see, if your novel landed on my desk today … It wouldn’t be a good fit for our list.’

‘The new book is very different to The Witness ,’ Emily said.

And indeed it was, in that one existed and the other did not.

‘I’ll be delighted to take a look when it’s ready. And help you, in any way I can, with placing it elsewhere.’ Another kind smile. ‘But in the meantime, from Morningstar’s point of view … Unfortunately, we’re going to have to draw a line under this.’

A boiling-hot geyser of panic shot up into Emily’s chest.

‘What does that mean?’ she asked weakly.

Beth looked to Carolyn. ‘We understand there was an instalment of the advance paid out at some point?’

‘Twenty-five thousand,’ Carolyn said, nodding.

‘Twenty-five thousand,’ Beth repeated, turning back to Emily with a grave look on her face. ‘I’m afraid that, in this instance, we would be looking to recover that sum.’

Emily said nothing. She feared that if she opened her mouth, a cascade of dry desert sand would come pouring out. Her face was burning. Sweat was pooling in the small of her back. She felt dizzy. In the absence of any other ideas, she picked up her water glass and drained the rest of it.

She didn’t have anything like that kind of money to hand.

Yes, once upon a time, she’d been paid what seemed like a lot to write two books. But she’d only written one of them, and there was her agent’s commission and tax stuff to deduct, and the rest had been paid piecemeal over a period of years. In the end, she’d been paid less to write books than she was currently making at a normal job – and these days, she had to work for an hour just to buy a book. She’d received the last payment – the one Beth wanted to recover – four years ago. If she borrowed that amount now, it would take her forever to pay it back, and that was if she even qualified for a loan in the first place.

Which she really doubted she would.

And then, like a wave rising up behind all these other feelings, came anger, directed entirely at herself.

This was all her fault. No one else’s. She’d squandered this opportunity. She’d got in her own way.

All she had to do was make up a story, for God’s sake. How hard could it be?

‘But,’ Beth said brightly, ‘there may be another option.’ She reached into the large leather bag at her feet and withdrew an unmarked manila envelope. ‘Before we continue, can I get you to sign this?’ She extracted what looked like a thin contract and slid it across the table, along with a pen, smiling apologetically. ‘It’s just a standard non-disclosure agreement.’

Emily made a show of scanning the pages, but all she could see was blurry text. On the last one, she scribbled an ‘E’ followed by a squiggly line as blood rushed in her ears. She was desperate to hear what Beth was proposing. She was biting down hard on the I’ll do it! already waiting on her tongue.

Beth slipped the signed agreement back into the envelope, then turned to look at Carolyn, who looked at Emily and said, ‘What do you know about Jack Smyth?’

The question was like a radio transmission from deep space: alien, incomprehensible and utterly unexpected.

‘Jack Smyth?’ Emily repeated.

She thought Carolyn couldn’t possibly mean Ireland’s most famous innocent guilty man until the other woman added, ‘It’s big news here, right? Have you been following the story?’

‘Ah, yeah. Sure. I mean, sort of.’

You had to follow it somewhat, whether you wanted to or not, because it was everywhere. Front pages. TV news headlines. Your auntie’s WhatsApp dispatches, the kind the app warned had already been forwarded many times .

Jack Smyth, the handsome, well-liked, retired road-racer whose celebrity had only grown since he’d hung up his cycling shoes, had lost his glamorous TV presenter wife, Kate, in a fire at their home last November. At first, the national heart bled for what seemed like only the latest tragic turn in this talented man’s life. He’d already lost his dad in a car accident as a teen, his childhood best friend to suicide just before his first Olympics in Rio, and his promising cycling career to a horror crash on a wet French hillside that had left him with a permanent limp. And yet he’d managed not only to survive, but to thrive. He had a successful athleisure brand called Exis, was patron to several high-profile charities and was a much-in-demand motivational speaker, earning huge fees for his electrifying appearances. For a while, there’d even been talk of him getting back on the bike.

But then, aged just thirty-one, he’d arrived home too late to save his wife of one year from the fire engulfing their house, but just in time to watch her die in his arms.

He’d used that line in a primetime television interview shortly after the tragedy that one in every four people in Ireland had watched go out live.

When it emerged that Kate Smyth had died of a broken neck before the fire had started, prompting the Gardaí to open a murder inquiry, the public mood had turned. In the absence of much fact, rumours swirled and spread like an especially virulent infection. He’d pushed her down the stairs and then set the fire to cover his tracks, for reasons that changed with the day of the week. Money problems. Infidelities. A change in his personality brought on by a head injury sustained in the cycling crash.

Reddit threads grew like knotweed. Self-styled body-language experts studied clips of his TV interview frame-by-frame and posted their conclusions to TikTok. Everyone knew someone who knew somebody who’d heard something from a friend of theirs who knew a Garda. They know he did it , people said with authority over pints, across dinner tables and huddled on the steps of the church after Mass. They just can’t prove it – but they will.

What the hell did he have to do with anything?

‘We’ve signed his memoir,’ Carolyn said. ‘Not his life story, but his side of this story.’

‘Oh.’ Seeing as Emily had absolutely no idea where this could be going or what it had to do with her, it seemed like the safest response.

‘You see,’ Carolyn continued, ‘Jack is trapped in this hellish limbo. Innocent until proven guilty, but precisely because he’s innocent, he’ll never get the chance to prove that he is. No charges have been brought, but there’s all this speculation and suspicion … It’s suffocating. It’s ruining his life. What life he has left. So he’s decided to take matters into his own hands. He’s going to do a book. Tell his story, in his own words. And we’re going to publish it.’ She paused. ‘His share of the royalties is going to go directly to his charitable foundation, so profiting from the proceeds of crime won’t be an issue, as far as we’re concerned.’

‘And anyway, he didn’t commit a crime,’ Beth added.

‘Oh,’ Emily said again.

There was an open and active murder inquiry, so the inquest into Kate’s death had been adjourned and the coroner’s report, aside from a few basic facts, sealed from the public. No one had been brought to trial, which meant there’d been no opportunity for evidence to be heard in open court, and Ireland’s draconian libel laws prevented the media from reporting anything other than the most basic, innocuous facts.

On top of that, Jack Smyth had all but disappeared from public life.

This black hole where information should be only increased the demand for it. People were as ravenous for details as horror-movie zombies were for flesh, and the longer they were forced to go without a feed, the more crazed with hunger they became. In her mind’s eye, Emily saw Black Friday-style stampedes at bookshops on Jack’s book’s publication day. She wouldn’t be among them, but she’d definitely trawl through all the articles and tweets rushing to give all the major revelations away.

What did any of this have to do with her ?

‘We’re handling it from our London office,’ Beth said, ‘because we know Dublin is a village’ – she smiled briefly at this – ‘but we and Jack are in agreement that whoever helps him to tell his story should be Irish too. We’re trying to move as fast as possible in order to minimize the chances of this getting out, so we have an exceptionally tight schedule and almost no wiggle room. That, combined with the nature of the project … Well, this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, which we understand. It’s been a struggle, to be frank.’ She brightened. ‘But then, we thought of you.’

Emily wasn’t following. She worried that she’d accidentally zoned out and missed something crucial.

‘We’d protect your identity,’ Beth pushed on, ‘so your involvement need never be public. We’d fly you to Florida at the earliest possible opportunity, to spend a week interviewing Jack. Then we think maybe four, possibly six weeks to write the book? But we can talk about that. In exchange, we’d cancel your existing contract with no money owed, there’d be a standard ghostwriting flat fee and we’d of course cover all expenses. A mutually beneficial solution.’ She turned up her palms. ‘So, what do you say? Is this something you’d consider doing?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Emily said. ‘I’m not quite—’

‘Jack Smyth needs a ghostwriter,’ Carolyn said. ‘And we’d like it to be you.’