When I started writing CJ, her age was never something I debated. She was forty-five because that was the woman I could see.

She had already lived. She had built a career, made money, travelled, accumulated friendships and opinions and habits she had no particular desire to apologise for. She knew what she liked, what bored her, what she was prepared to tolerate and what would have her reaching for the door. She wasn’t standing at the beginning of adulthood waiting for life to happen to her. Most of it already had.

And that was exactly what interested me.

There is no shortage of romance about people finding love while they are still becoming themselves. I wanted to write about what happens when love arrives after that work is largely done.

CJ doesn’t need somebody to show her who she is. She knows.

She doesn’t need a man to give her confidence, financial security, a social life or somewhere beautiful to live. She doesn’t need somebody to rescue her from a terrible job or persuade her she deserves more.

Her life is good.

That matters, because it changes the question at the centre of the romance.

It isn’t whether Chase can make her life better because it was inadequate before him. It is whether somebody can enter a life that is already full and become important enough that she willingly makes space for him.

There is something quite different about falling in love when you’re older. By forty-five, your life has shape. You have routines that nobody else gets a vote on. You know which side of the bed you sleep on. You have friends who have been there long before the new person appeared and, if they’re good friends, will still be there if he disappears. You probably own too much of something. In CJ’s case, several things.

You know yourself well enough that compromise doesn’t always feel romantic. Occasionally it just feels inconvenient.

That gave me far more to work with than the idea of somebody coming along to complete her.

I’ve never particularly understood that version of love anyway.

I don’t think two people should have to be incomplete before a relationship can matter. If anything, I find the opposite more interesting. Two people who are perfectly capable of continuing without one another, and then discover they’d rather not.

CJ’s independence is a very real part of her. She has built her life around it. She enjoys her freedom. She likes being able to decide what she’s doing without consulting anybody. She doesn’t regard being single as a condition from which she needs to recover.

She is also sexual, and I wanted that to be completely ordinary.

Not brave for her age. Not daring. Not some triumphant statement about women over forty still being desirable.

She’s forty-five, not dead.

She likes men. She likes sex. She knows her body. She’s comfortable with what she wants. She doesn’t spend much time wondering whether any of that is age appropriate because it doesn’t occur to her that somebody else gets to decide.

The same is true of the way she looks.

She can put on an immaculate suit and walk into a serious financial meeting, then go home, change clothes and become the blonde woman with full tattooed arms heading out to hear music loud enough to make conversation pointless.

Neither version is the disguise.

That’s CJ.

People are allowed to contain more than one thing.

In fact, the older I get, the less believable I find characters who don’t.

We collect contradictions as we live. The disciplined person can also be reckless. The confident person can have one subject they won’t discuss. Someone can command a room professionally and still make an astonishingly stupid decision at midnight because somebody attractive smiled at them.

Experience doesn’t remove contradiction. It gives you more of it.

CJ came alive for me because she had those layers. I could see her in a boardroom as clearly as I could see her standing in front of a wardrobe trying to decide whether something showed too much tattoo. I knew what music she would put on. I knew the kind of apartment she would choose. I knew what would make her laugh and, more importantly, the things she wouldn’t explain.

None of that required her to be twenty-eight.

Actually, it worked better because she wasn’t.

There is an assumption buried in a lot of romance that the most interesting love story must also be the first significant one, or at least happen while the characters are still young enough for every emotional experience to feel unprecedented.

But there are experiences that become more interesting because they aren’t your first.

Attraction after you’ve already been attracted to people.

Love after you thought you understood what love looked like.

Meeting somebody after you’ve spent years forming quite sensible conclusions about what you do and don’t want.

Experience gives you something to compare against.

It gives you reasons to be sceptical.

It makes surprise harder.

And therefore, when somebody does surprise you, considerably more interesting.

That’s the territory I wanted CJ in.

She isn’t waiting for the great love story of her life because she doesn’t believe her life requires one.

Then life becomes inconvenient.

I won’t tell you how.

You’ll have to read the book for that.

But that is where CJ begins: forty-five, accomplished, independent, heavily tattooed, very good at what she does and entirely unconvinced that there is anything missing.

Which, as it turns out, is a rather interesting place for a romance to start.