At first the reader is only aware that the narrator (Dee) is finishing Lila Thwaite's novel and that she is a bitter, sarcastic woman. Her life consists of shutting herself away except for three hours every afternoon when she walks down to a small cafe and spies on a man who meets first his wife there and then after saying goodbye to her, meets with his lover at the same table.

Dee is initially content just to observe but after a while can't resist trying to get a closer view of the situation and befriends both mother hen and bug eyes, learning their real names and the people behind the surface appearances. At this point I'm hoping the reader will find it just that little bit harder to laugh at the unfortunate lives of these two and Dee will start to feel guilty and will start interfering to a point where she can't draw out and where she's trying to fix both of the women's problems but finding that their happiness is in direct conflict.

There will at some point be a scene where Dee confronts the horrible mr coffee stain and finds him to be disgustingly pathetic but also just as human as any other. She reaches the point where she thinks she might have found a solution and then this scene comes back to haunt her when mr coffee stain tells both his wife and lover just what Dee is up to, that she is using them all in some sick game to help her write a novel based on their lives.

As far from the truth as this is, both women are taken in. Then while all of this is unfolding, you get extracts from Lila/Dee's novel which is entitled 'casting shadows' and are introduced to the characters of Briar, Sophie and Eric who are basically altered reflections of mr coffee stain, mother hen and bug eyes (the man his wife and his lover).

You also get to meet the writer's friends and there will be several side plots there (a.k.a love interest and family conflicts) and you'll get to know quite a lot about who Lila was during this time. Then, as the story trundles onwards, it becomes clear that the writer is suffering from a terminal illness and it's later divulged that she has cancer. About the same time you start to realise that our wonderful narrator Dee (Delilah) is in fact not Lila's ghost writer but rather she is Lila and has merely taken on a new identity since her illness because she feels like a different person. It's hard to explain and I'm hoping I do a better job in the story XD

But anyway, Lila then dies of cancer after a long and awful struggle while still being bugged by her agent/ publisher and without managing to finish her final novel. And what happens to the man his wife and his lover? That hasn't presented itself to me yet but I'm sure it will come. Almost every night I sleep, I wake up knowing more about where this is going. If you're reading Sachiko, I've changed my mind. Being a lucid dreamer really is pretty fun, weary through the day or not. And it sure is making my work easy all of a sudden.