There’s a moment in my debut novel, Room 706, in which the protagonist, Kate, hiding in a room with her lover in a hotel that has been taken over by terrorists, writes down a series of letters and numbers. “What’s that?” James, her lover, asks. “The password for the online grocery app,” Kate replies. Of everything she wants to tell her husband in case she does not make it out alive, this seems the most important, or at least the easiest, to write down.
Kate meets James in London hotel rooms every few months for no-strings sex, despite being happily married to Vic. When she tries to rationalise her actions to herself, she compares this to a shoe-buying habit, or a woman secretly having ‘tweakments’. It’s a kind of ‘me time’ that allows Kate to be a wife and mother the rest of the time.
