Her Last Breath: The new gripping summer page-turner from the No 1 bestseller

‘That’s right. But I was very naïve back then.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’d been so full of hope. I presumed the more I learnt, the more success I’d have. But the truth was, it was a tough time.’ She didn’t mind talking about this. Each writer needed their rags to riches story and this was hers. And it was less complicated than the real story, the one where she was a neglected little girl dragged through the care system. She wanted to keep that to herself.

‘Tell me more,’ Louis said, leaning forward.

She sighed. ‘I moved out of uni digs into a small flat of my own. I’d saved up money for rent while working at a patisserie nearby during uni. I knew my savings wouldn’t cover me for more than three months if I didn’t get a job, but I was hopeful it wouldn’t be long before I’d have a steady stream of income as a nutritionist.’

‘And that didn’t happen?’

‘Nope. I quickly learnt you can’t just create a reputation based on qualifications. Weeks then months went by with no income. I ended up having to move out of the flat into a room share in a rough part of town.’

Estelle shuddered as she thought of that time. She’d ended up sharing a filthy room with a skinny strung-out girl who reminded Estelle too much of her birth mother. There were dark times then, very dark times, all too familiar to Estelle.

‘I was just about to give up,’ Estelle continued, ‘when the blog stuff started paying off.’

‘You set the blog up eight years ago to help a friend, right?’

Estelle nodded. ‘Yes. My friend Genevieve was diagnosed with type two diabetes. It was a shock to her but not anyone else. Her diet was terrible. I basically took over her kitchen. The improvement in her health was amazing, so she convinced me to start blogging. With each post, I gained more followers and some advertising too.’

The income generated from those ads had been minimal but enough for Estelle to move from that grotty bedsit. She remembered crying in relief. It wasn’t just about the filthy surroundings, the noise and the anxious flatmate. It was about extracting herself from her past, moving herself as far away as possible from the destiny her childhood could have moulded for her.

‘And eventually, you set up on other channels such as YouTube and your social media platforms?’ Louis said. ‘Is that when it all really took off?’

Estelle nodded. ‘Yes, that’s when the clients really started to come in – so many I couldn’t keep up!’

Louis tapped away on his laptop. She watched him, trying to control her nerves. Was she coming across okay?

He looked up. ‘So why the pure-eating ethos?’

‘Studying food sciences at university gave me an insight into the chemicals you can find in everyday foods. I guess it became a bit of an obsession.’

‘And thus your crusade against toxics in foods, as you describe it in Pure, began?’

‘Oh, you’ve read the book?’ Estelle’s heart started to hammer. Was he leading up to telling her he hated it?

‘I got a review copy on Friday and devoured it in a few hours. I loved it.’

Estelle smiled, full of relief.

‘Have you managed to try out some of the recipes?’ she asked.

‘Absolutely! I loved the Rower’s Delight cocoa mousse. I presume your other half Seb inspired you with that one?’ he said, peering towards a photo of the couple on the fridge: Seb in his Team GB uniform, arm around Estelle, who was smiling into the camera.

Estelle nodded. ‘It’s his favourite.’

‘You met in 2015 after being brought in to assist a nutritionist advising Team GB in the lead-up to the Rio Olympics, right?’

Estelle nodded. She still remembered the day she got the call from the nutritionist she’d met a few months back during a friend’s party. She’d been having a down day, wondering when her career would go up a gear. It felt stagnant. Sure, she was getting clients, her social media channels were doing well. But something inside her – the desire to put her childhood well and truly behind her – yearned for more. That was the problem. When you knew how bad it could be – how vast and black having nothing was – you always lived with the fear you’d return to it again. So the scramble for more wasn’t about greed, it was about fear, pure and simple.

‘Was it love at first sight?’ the journalist asked.

Estelle thought back to that time two years ago when she’d arrived at the Olympic rowing team’s UK training camp where they were gearing up for Brazil the following year. She’d been overwhelmed. It was the accumulation of all she’d worked hard for, so she’d been so overtaken by emotion, she’d felt tears spring to her eyes.

‘You okay there?’ she’d heard a voice ask. And there was Seb, water dripping from his wet dark hair, shoulders broad and strong in contrast to his narrow waist. He looked so clean and so pure, the perfect specimen of health. Just being around him made her feel the same way too. So she’d taken a deep breath, forced the tears away and smiled. ‘Perfect,’ she’d said.

Estelle’s doorbell went, shattering the memory.

‘Do you mind just waiting a moment while I answer the door?’ she said, wondering who it might be.

Louis nodded. ‘Of course.’

She skipped down the hallway, adrenaline buzzing from her interview. It made it all feel even more real, having a national newspaper journalist in her kitchen, talking about her life. Maybe she wasn’t such a fraud after all.

She opened the front door, surprised to see the son of her local butcher on the doorstep. Then she remembered she had a delivery due that day. ‘Of course! Come in, William,’ she said, leading the young red-cheeked teenager to her vast kitchen. He smiled shyly as he carried in the large wooden crate, various meats wrapped in white crinkly paper inside it. ‘Just here will be great,’ she said, gesturing to the kitchen top closest to the fridge. He placed it down and Estelle pulled out a five-pound note, handing it to him as a tip.

Louis smiled. ‘You get your meat delivered?’

‘They don’t usually do deliveries, but it’s impossible to lug around all the meat on the back of my pedal bike,’ she said. ‘So I sweet-talked the owner of the local butcher to do a weekly delivery. I think it’s important to support independent businesses whenever possible, and I’m lucky enough to be able to do so. Plus, it’s mega cheap,’ she added with a wink.

Louis turned to the butcher’s son. ‘How does it feel delivering meat to a soon-to-be published chef?’

‘Cool,’ William replied as he took the money. ‘Dad’s going to the book launch too, he’s really looking forward to it. Even got a new suit and everything.’

Estelle smiled, hiding the slight note of worry she felt. Her publicist Kim had been the one to come up with the idea of inviting her local suppliers to the launch. What better way to highlight just how clean and local Estelle was by having her butcher and greengrocer at her launch party to mingle with journalists? But now she was wondering if it would seem a bit contrived. Would people see through it?

Would they see through her?

After William left, Estelle started placing the meat in her large American-style fridge.

‘So do you do all the cooking in the household?’ Louis asked.

‘Yes, of course.’ She caught Louis raising an eyebrow. ‘This isn’t about being an obedient housewife,’ she quickly added. ‘It’s pure selfishness on my part. I love cooking.’ And she really did. The whole sensory experience of it, the feel of food on her fingertips, a thousand different textures. The smells and the colours, the sound of sizzling meat and whisking flour. The taste too, of course. It was a form of therapy for her: kneading, mixing, slicing everything away, all thoughts, all memories gone until it was just her at her simplest in that kitchen, focused on making the best dishes she could.

She pulled away the white paper from a large slab of beef ready to put it in the fridge. Then she frowned. There was something on top of the meat, square and white.

She looked over at Louis who was busy tapping away at his laptop at the other end of the large island, then she grabbed a fork and lifted the item off the meat. It was an envelope, a name scrawled on the front.

Stel.

She peered at the windowsill, where the poppies she’d received the evening before had been placed in a vase. The note that had come with them had been addressed to Stel too.

She quickly opened the envelope and pulled out a Polaroid photo. It was a close-up photo of a teenage girl. Sad brown eyes. Freckled button nose. Dyed red hair … red hair that made her think of another girl, another time.

Alice.

But it wasn’t Alice. In fact, Estelle had no idea who the girl in the photo was. But as she looked into her eyes, she still felt a flare of recognition.