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unless you’d rather go home after the dinner). It’s going to be one of those weeks. I need someone at my side who will make things better, not worse. There are so few of those kinds of people around these days. Let me know if you get any bright ideas.
    See you then,
    M x
    P.S. How is your hip? Any better? I do hope so! I’m looking forward to a proper catch-up and a lot of fun—if I can get through the committee meeting without throttling anyone.
*
    “Emily? Emily Castles?” The voice on the phone sounded like menthol cigarettes and feathers. “I don’t know if you’d remember me…”
    But Emily knew instantly who was calling. No one else had a voice quite like Morgana Blakely, the famous romance novelist, whom Emily had met while helping out at a local stage school.
    “I’m presiding over a gathering of romance authors at a conference in London this weekend.”
    Surely there was a more appropriate word than gathering: a pash, a kiss, a smooch of romance authors?
    Morgana interrupted Emily’s mental thesaurusing. “I rather think I’ve overfaced myself, and I need a hand with it. Muriel put your name forward. Would you be free to help, by any chance?”
    Emily was free, as it happened. Until last Friday she had been working on a temporary contract in a tower in the financial district of Canary Wharf, East London. The tower was shiny, imposing and soulless. It was the sort of place where the occupants of a crowded elevator never asked incomers which floor they wanted, so that someone near the relevant buttons could press the one that would take everyone to their respective destinations: they expected you to push and stretch to get to the button yourself. Emily had tried calling out, “Forty-five, please!” She had tried shouting, “Which floor?” if she herself had managed to get nearer the operating panel than the other people piling into the elevator. Her words were met with resistance or incomprehension. After a few days she had realized that if you wanted to change the world, an elevator in a tower in Canary Wharf might not be the best place to start. It had depressed her, but at least she’d had the money to pay her phone bill at the end of the month.
    The people in the department where she had been “embedded” (according to the bizarre new terminology from her handler at the employment agency, who persisted in talking as though Emily were a reporter dispatched to a faraway war) had been friendly enough, but the work had not been satisfying. Still, Emily had been sorry that the contract had come to an end. She would be glad of any kind of employment, even a weekend at a gathering of romance authors. Well, especially a weekend at a gathering of romance authors—depending on her duties, of course.
    “All you have to do,” Morgana explained, “is turn up tomorrow morning at the Coram Hotel in Bloomsbury so we can get the delegates’ gift bags organized, and then be on hand for the gala dinner and the conference itself. I’m so glad you can help out. I was so impressed with your resourcefulness when we met. And, of course, Muriel speaks very highly of you.” Muriel was “Dr. Muriel” to Emily; a neighbor who lived on the same street as Emily in South London, as did Morgana’s nephew, Piers Blakely, and his wife, Victoria.
    Emily wasn’t the sort of person to wonder whether Piers spoke very highly of her as well. He always offered her a glass or two of chilled white wine when the family was about to go on holiday, and Emily went round to be briefed about how best to look after their cat. If Piers kept his opinion of Emily to himself when talking to Morgana—even if it was a good opinion—so much the better. As for Victoria, she was indebted to Emily for Emily’s intervention during the end-of-term show at the stage school she owned and ran, which was where Emily had first met Morgana. Emily had saved lives at that show. She didn’t doubt that Victoria spoke very highly of her