Iris never stays. She has a rule about it.

A flawless record of walking away clean, £420 of studio rent due, and a commission she can't afford to refuse: paint the wife of a decent Notting Hill architect for the couple's tenth anniversary.

Margot has spent twenty years being the sensible one. A&E nurse, the kind who keeps her composure through an arterial bleed. The woman who holds everyone else upright and has never once done a thing just because she wanted it.

Then she sits for a portrait in a freezing East London studio, and the painter looks at her the way nobody has bothered to look in years.

It should be simple. Hold the pose, paint the picture, hang it in Notting Hill by summer. But the sittings keep running long. The studio keeps getting warmer. Iris — a woman who does not so much as own a second mug — catches herself hoping she'll stay.

And Margot keeps coming back, wanting, for the first time in her life, something she is not allowed to have.

A warm, funny, achingly romantic story about the person you meant to be and the person you turn out to be.