“I need to call my daughter.”

“I’m sorry. Is she ill?”

“No.” The truth was out before it had occurred to Rosaline how much more useful it could have been to lie. “But I said I’d ring her, and I don’t want to be breaking promises to my child.”

“That’s very sweet.” Colin Thrimp nodded with an infuriatingly unhelpful helpfulness. “But you did sign a contract, allowing the company to restrict your communications if necessary during filming.”

“Oh come on, mate,” muttered Harry. “She’s not going to get sourdough tips from a primary school kid.”

Colin Thrimp eyed Harry nervously. “I don’t make the rules. The production company makes the rules.”

“Does that mean,” asked Rosaline, “Jennifer makes the rules?”

Dropping what was left of his bun, Colin Thrimp clasped his hands together, half-imploring, half-frustrated. “You cannot go to Jennifer with this.”

Aha. Rosaline knew how this worked. “I want to go to Jennifer.”

“She’s reviewing the footage. She’ll be furious.”

“I’m furious. Get me a phone or get me Jennifer.”

Colin Thrimp got the fleeting calculating look of a yes-man not certain who to say yes to. “I . . . I really can’t. You can phone your daughter tomorrow. It’ll be fine.”

“It’s not fine. I promised I’d call tonight.”

A door creaked open on the other side of the car park. “Colin,” barked Jennifer Hallett. “Get me another six coffees. It’s going to be an unlubed arsefuck of an evening to whisk this chunky diarrhoea you call footage into something approaching watchable television.”

“Please don’t,” whispered Colin Thrimp.

No chance. Rosaline strode across the gravel towards Jennifer Hallett. “I need to talk to my daughter.”

Jennifer Hallet paused, an unbranded brown cup denting in her hand. “Am I your daughter? Do I look like your daughter? Then why the fuck are you bothering me about it?”

“You’ve confiscated my phone like you’ve caught me texting in assembly.”

“You’re under a pissing embargo. Either you live with it, or we’ve got no shortage of ovens for you to stick your head in.”

Rosaline sighed. This was getting circular. Like a saw. And she should probably have stopped pressing her face against it. “Look, she’s eight, I’m a single mother—”

“Yes,” interrupted Jennifer Hallett, “and you’re twenty-seven. Born in Kensington. And now you live in some shitty commuter town. You work at WHSmith’s and look good in a pinny. I know everything I need to know about you, sunshine.”

Oh God. All this time Rosaline had been worried she was the boring one and it turned out she was the pretty one. The one who would get through to week six and who everyone would say was only still on the show because one of the judges fancied her. That didn’t say good things about her career prospects, but maybe she could make it work for her now. “And how good do you think I’ll look in my pinny if I’ve spent the whole night stressing about my child?”

There was a cut-the-red-wire pause.

“Colin, give the woman her phone.”

“But . . . but,” protested Colin, “they’re all locked up.”

“Then give her yours, put her on speaker, and stay with her. Never let this happen again.”

The trailer door slammed closed before anyone could say anything else.

“Wow, mate,” said Harry. “You was a force of nature.”

Rosaline had just received an impromptu lecture on the sarcastic fringehead—which Amelie had described as “an angry fish with a sad face and a big mouth that defends its territory by making its head huge.” And, from context, was taking this to mean her daughter hadn’t been scarred for life by having to wait twenty minutes to talk to her mother. “Look, thanks for coming with me. I’m sorry I was kind of rude earlier.”

“I get it. Had to call your kid, didn’t you?”

“Except now I feel like I was being neurotic. Because I made an enormous fuss and she was fine. Incredibly fine.”

Colin Thrimp had given her a deeply put-out look when she’d handed him his phone back.

Harry shrugged. “You got to keep your promises. Especially to kids.” He was silent for a moment, frowning very slightly—something was clearly going on in his head, but she had no idea what. “My sister’s ex is a bit flaky with it. Good bloke, mind. Loves ’em to pieces. Except he’s a bit of a lad, you know?”

It wasn’t anything Rosaline had personally experienced—none of her exes could easily have been described as lads, even the men. All the same, she thought she knew what he was driving at.

“Like,” Harry went on slowly, “he’ll say he’ll be somewhere or do something, and he’ll forget. Not always but sometimes. And he don’t mean nothing by it, and he makes it up to ’em, but you can see it has an effect.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.” She wasn’t sure why this had surprised her—because he obviously hadn’t emerged from a rock like Mithras.

“Got three, mate.”

And this was why she didn’t talk to him more. It wasn’t so much—as she’d first thought—that he never said anything. It was that he kept expecting you to say things back, and Rosaline was a lot more comfortable when people would obligingly fill the silences with themselves. “That’s . . . a lot of sisters.”

“Tell me about it. Meant the bathroom was really clean, but hard to get into.”

“And one of them’s a single mum, like me?” Wait. Was that why he’d given her his number last week? Not as a clumsy come-on, but because she’d reminded him of his sister. Was that worse? Or did it just mean he . . . understood?

“Not much like you, Rosaline,” he said, with an almost playful look. “Her name don’t come out a play, for starters.”

She laughed. “She could be in a play. What’s she called?”

“Sam. Short for Samantha, but she gets well lairy if you call her that.”

“What about the others?”

“Nah. None of them are in plays either.”