In the meanwhile, a lot is happening in Fixie’s life. Thus begins Fixie and Seb’s endless exchange of favours and I owe you’s. After all, Seb is a successful investment manager who hires ‘bright’ people, and Ryan is ‘bright’, according to her. Desperate to get Ryan to stay in London, she decides to cash it. She remembers the IOU Seb had handed her out. Master-fixer Fixie’s mind goes in overdrive. He’s done with LA.” He wants to start afresh, in London, and he desperately needs a job. He says he’s back for good as “he has had it. He, who had moved to Los Angeles to become a movie producer. It is at this point in time does Jake’s best friend Ryan Chalker, Fixie’s crush since school days, makes an entry. Fixie treats it as a joke, puts the coffee sleeve into her bag, and forgets all about it. Redeemable in perpetuity,” on a coffee sleeve. Moved by this gesture of hers, Seb, the owner of the laptop, scribbles, “I owe you one. It so happens that when Fixie is ‘watching’ the stranger’s laptop, on request, the ceiling right above the laptop decides to cave in, and Fixie being Fixie jumps to save the laptop, at the cost of her own safety. A chance encounter in a coffee shop with a man who wants her to watch his laptop while he answers a phone call sets off a series of I owe you’s, lending the story its name, and taking the story forward. She runs it with her mother while her two older siblings - brother Jake and sister Nicole - are only good at talking her down.

Her life revolves around Farrs, a home-goods store in West London, which her father had set up. A crooked vase here, an out-of-place book there… she can’t help but ‘fix’ them.

I Owe You One by Sophie Kinsella