quick walk and then come home and tried to work, to distract myself, but it was impossible. I just couldn’t. I stood up, running my hands through my hair, thinking. Would Rebecca, the editor at Fitness & Style magazine, extend my deadline if I told her what was happening? Maybe. I walked back to the desk, grabbed my phone and, before I could change my mind, dialled her number. Two minutes later, I ended the call, relief flooding through me. She’d been lovely: shocked to hear that Danny was missing, and totally understanding my panic about my deadline.
‘Honestly, Gemma, don’t worry about it at all,’ she said. ‘I can easily move that piece to next week’s issue or even the week after that. Do it when you can. And if you need anything, anything at all, give me a buzz, OK? I’m sure he’ll come back soon though. Keep me posted, yes?’
I turned my laptop off and headed downstairs to the kitchen, thanking my lucky stars that I had such an understanding boss. Well, she wasn’t technically my boss – I was freelance, so I didn’t really have one – but for the past six months or so about fifty per cent of my work had been for Fitness & Style, which had been great. That, combined with the monthly column I wrote for Camille magazine, was more than enough to pay the bills, and I was lucky enough to pick up other commissions here and there too – the occasional travel feature for Red, or a health piece for Woman & Home. I hadn’t been sure about working for Fitness & Style at first; it was an online magazine, which made me a little nervous, having spent my career to date on ‘real world’ newspapers and magazines, publications you could hold in your hand. I’d been silly to worry though – with a rapidly growing readership, and a host of celebrity contributors, Fitness & Style was one of the biggest publishing success stories of the past few years, and I loved the variety of the work. Regular boxes of beauty samples arrived for me to test and review, and a few times a month there was a trip somewhere, maybe a new Pilates studio, the launch of a new fashion brand, or – the most coveted invitations – an overnight visit to a spa hotel or retreat, to try what they had to offer and write about my experiences. It was all a far cry from my early days as a news reporter, when I’d worked my way up through the regional press and finally landed my dream job at The Telegraph. I’d thrived for a while, adoring the buzz of chasing the big stories and landing the major interviews, but after a few years, the long hours and endless stress had begun to take their toll. Unexpectedly, I’d found myself becoming increasingly anxious, developing insomnia so crippling that I’d go days without sleep, panic gripping me as I stared at my blank screen, unable to write a single word. It all came to a head the day I was pulled into the editor’s office for a dressing-down for the second time in two weeks for failing to meet a deadline. That night, I staggered, sweating and shaking, off my tube train home two stops early, gasping for breath and convinced I was having a heart attack. When my doctor informed me the next day that it had most likely been a panic attack and told me frankly that I looked dreadful and needed to take some time off work for the sake of my mental health, I rang the paper and handed in my notice that same afternoon. It had been as if a huge, heavy weight had been lifted off my back, and I’d slept soundly that night for the first time in months. And I’d got lucky. A few high-profile stories during the previous year had boosted my profile, and when I decided to try going freelance and started looking around for work, I’d quickly been signed as a columnist for Camille, one of the UK’s biggest selling women’s monthly magazines. It paid well, very well, and the kudos the job gave me meant that other magazines were keen to commission me too. All the same, the transition hadn’t been easy, not in the early days. I missed the newsroom banter and my work friends, terribly at first, but we’d kept in touch, and very soon