People make decisions about other people very quickly.

Sometimes before a word has been spoken.

The suit says one thing. Tattoos say another. The apartment, the car, the accent, the job title, the way somebody orders wine, whether they know what fork to pick up first – we gather information and start filling in everything we haven’t been told.

Usually with remarkable confidence.

I have always found that interesting.

It’s one of the ideas underneath No Names, No Titles, although I didn’t sit down and decide to write a novel about identity. I saw the characters first and realised later how much of the story was about the difference between who somebody is and who everyone assumes they are.

CJ makes that particularly easy.

Put her in one room and you would form a perfectly reasonable opinion about her.

Put her somewhere else two hours later and you might form an entirely different one.

Both would be correct.

Neither would be complete.

I like people like that.

People who resist being understood in the first five minutes.

People who can be serious about one thing and completely unserious about another. Someone who understands financial markets but also has very strong opinions about music. Someone who can spend an indecent amount on a pair of shoes and happily wear Puma trainers the next day. Someone disciplined enough to build an extraordinary career but entirely capable of doing something impulsive simply because it feels good at the time.

That isn’t inconsistency.

It’s being a person.

Yet we are constantly encouraged to package ourselves into something more easily understood.

Professional self. Private self. Dating self. Family self.

Social media has probably made it worse. We can now construct a perfectly coherent version of ourselves for other people to consume, which would be useful if human beings were remotely coherent.

We’re not.

We are contradictory and contextual and occasionally very difficult to explain.

CJ has no interest in explaining herself.

That’s one of the things I enjoy about her.

There are parts of her life she has chosen to make public and parts she hasn’t. She doesn’t feel everyone is automatically entitled to both simply because they’re curious.

Chase is different in some ways, but he also understands what it means to be seen through the things attached to you.

Success does that.

A title walks into the room before the person does.

Money does the same.

People begin to behave according to what they know about you, or what they think they know, and it becomes difficult to work out where the reaction to the person ends and the reaction to everything surrounding them begins.

Most of us experience some version of that.

Maybe not at the same level as CJ and Chase, but the mechanism is familiar.

Tell somebody what you do for a living and watch their picture of you adjust.

Tell them where you grew up.

Tell them how much you earn.

Tell them you’re divorced.

Tell them you’ve never married.

Tell them you don’t have children.

Tell them something unexpected and there is always that tiny recalibration.

Oh. You’re one of those.

Whatever “those” happens to mean.

So what happens if somebody gets to know you without the usual information?

Which version do they meet?

Perhaps a more honest one.

Or perhaps simply a different one.

I don’t think removing information automatically reveals some pure, authentic self underneath. We aren’t onions.

But it does remove shortcuts.

You have to pay attention to other things.

How somebody talks.

What makes them laugh.

Whether they’re kind when nobody important is watching.

What they notice.

What interests them when they’re not trying to impress anybody.

Whether they ask questions because they genuinely want the answer or because they’re waiting for their turn to speak.

Those things tell you quite a lot.

Often more than the résumé.

That fascinated me when I was writing CJ and Chase because they are both people who could very easily be reduced to what they have achieved.

And neither of them is remotely that simple.

CJ is particularly resistant to being known through her public identity. There are reasons for that which belong to the book, so I’m not going to dismantle her here before you’ve met her properly.

But privacy is important to her.

Not secrecy for the sake of creating drama.

Privacy.

I think we’ve lost some distinction between the two.

Keeping something to yourself does not necessarily mean you are ashamed of it, frightened of it or hiding something sinister.

Sometimes it simply belongs to you.

CJ understands that instinctively.

Chase, on the other hand, is curious.

Also instinctively.

Which makes things interesting.

Because intimacy requires some amount of access. At some point, if somebody becomes important, they begin crossing the boundaries between the versions of you that other people only see separately.

They meet the professional person and the one who swears in the kitchen.

They see the immaculate wardrobe and the old T-shirt you refuse to throw away.

They hear the story you tell at dinner and eventually learn the part you always leave out.

That, to me, is one of the most interesting things about falling in love.

Not being adored.

Being gradually recognised.

The dangerous moment isn’t when somebody thinks you’re extraordinary.

It’s when they start seeing the ordinary pieces as well and remain interested.

That idea runs all the way through No Names, No Titles.

How much of ourselves do we reveal?

Who gets to see which part?

And what happens when somebody starts seeing more than we planned?

I could tell you the answer.

But that would rather ruin the book.