Our Stop

4
Daniel

‘You’ve been infatuated with her for months, mate. Today is a big day!’

Lorenzo had called him at work, despite being asked not to. But Lorenzo hated his job and got bored easily and liked winding up his flatmate and also feigning busyness at his own desk, at a publishing house north of the river. Plus, he was charming enough to persuade the receptionist, Percy, to connect the call, even though Daniel had given Percy numerous and explicit instructions not to. Lorenzo enjoyed practising his charm and getting his own way. Reaching Daniel at his office was another way for him to show off.

‘She’s not bloody seen it, though,’ Daniel hissed down the phone.

‘Can you change the adjectives and send it again, for somebody else you’ve spotted? Throw enough shit and something will stick,’ Lorenzo said, and Daniel was about 70 per cent sure he wasn’t joking. Lorenzo said he wanted a relationship, but from what Daniel had seen his requirements for dating were that she had a pulse, and didn’t talk too much. It was very Lorenzo of him to suggest simply trying the same tactic with another woman.

‘Go and sell some books,’ Daniel retorted.

‘Can’t be arsed, mate. Still on a comedown.’

Daniel hated that Lorenzo did coke Thursday through Sunday. He never did it at home, Lorenzo promised, but Daniel was still the one made to put up with his mood swings as he scaled the walls and then festered on the sofa for the first half of the week – even if he did watch great telly as he did it. Lorenzo was a good bloke, but didn’t half make some choices that Daniel couldn’t help but think weren’t exactly sound. It was so frustrating to be witness to. They’d ended up living together through a SpareRoom.co.uk advert Lorenzo had put up, and Daniel had his suspicions from the beginning that they were a bit chalk and cheese, but the location of the flat and the rent price were basically perfect, so Daniel had made a decision to largely overlook their differences, not quite becoming friends, but certainly becoming more than just strangers who lived together. They had forged their own, very particular, double act, and until Daniel had a place of his own, it did the job.

‘I’m going now,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve got actual work to do. I’ll see you at home.’

Lorenzo was still talking as he put the phone down. Not seconds later, Daniel’s mobile flashed with a message. It was Lorenzo.

Well done on having the balls, mate, it said. That was Lorenzo’s way of saying, I know you hate it when I’m a twat but I can’t help it. Daniel double-tapped it and gave it a thumbs-up.

Daniel resumed idly scrolling through the emails on his desktop, trying to focus on the day ahead and not on the morning that had been. He couldn’t. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He couldn’t stop thinking about the day they first met.

Not long after Daniel’s father had died, just after Easter, Daniel had begun to force himself to leave his desk whenever he felt claustrophobic, or uneasy, or like he might cry. In his grief – the word ‘depression’ still sort of stuck in his throat a bit, sounded a bit wet – his therapist had said that being outside, in nature, would always help.

Christ. He couldn’t believe he had a therapist.

‘Keep using your body, make sure you engage with the world, take a stroll around the nearest park, even, just to get the energy moving differently,’ she told him at one of their first sessions together, when he’d said about panic attacks that grabbed him by the throat and made him feel like he couldn’t breathe.

He’d had to pay sixty-five pounds an hour to go private because the NHS waiting list was too long, his situation too dire to wait because he could barely function, and he wondered, not unkindly, if this was the kind of advice he could expect for two hundred plus quid a month. Anyway. Walk he did, at the very least to feel like he was getting value for money, and she’d been there, Nadia (of course, he didn’t know that was her name then), in the courtyard tucked away off Borough Market. A random Friday. Poof. At his lowest, in a moment of pure emotional desperation, this positive, engaged, clever woman had appeared and her verve – her very essence, her aura – was like sunshine, solar-powering everyone around her. It had knocked Daniel sideways.

Daniel knew exactly which day he’d first seen her because it was two weeks after the funeral, and five weeks after he’d started his six-month consulting contract at Converge, a petroleum engineering firm. It was the day his mother had rung when he was in a meeting about the design flaws of a submersive drill, and he’d excused himself in time to pick up in case it was urgent.

She’d said, ‘He’s here.’

‘What do you mean, Mum?’ Daniel had replied. ‘Dad’s … Dad died, remember?’

He’d held his breath as he waited for her to realize she’d used the wrong word, said the wrong thing. He held up two fingers to the guys on the other side of the glass partition, signalling two minutes. He just needed two minutes. They were impatient, needing his sign-off before lunch, and suspicious of an outsider coming in this late in the project and pissed off that he’d been pushing for a pivot on the next steps. He didn’t care. He wanted to make sure his mum was okay. He wouldn’t be able to handle it if she had dementia or memory loss or something. He’d just lost his dad – he couldn’t lose her too.

‘Daniel,’ she’d replied, level-headed. ‘I know he’s bloody dead. It’s his ashes. They’ve just been dropped off.’

Daniel exhaled loudly in relief. She wasn’t crazy. Well. Any crazier.

‘But it’s a bloody bin bag’s worth! He’s so bloody heavy I can’t shift him anywhere. So he’s just here. In the kitchen with me, by the back door. All his ashes in a heavy-duty bag that I don’t know what to do with.’

Daniel closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, stunned. His dad’s ashes. Because his dad was dead.

‘I’m having a coffee and telling him – your dad – about Janet Peterson’s new Vauxhall Mokka – they had it in gold, can you bear it! Gold! And you know, I say new but obviously it’s good second-hand. Cars lose money as soon as you drive them off the forecourt – but anyway, it’s a bit creepy. Your dad. Can you come by after work and help me?’

Daniel could almost have laughed. In fact, he did laugh, and told his mum he’d be across to Ealing Broadway at about seven, and in the meantime to go hang out in the living room to watch Loose Women instead. She’d been so strong since the funeral that it made him feel ashamed to be the “weak” one. He was about to go back into the meeting – literally had his hand on the door knob to push back through – when his throat closed up and his shirt collar felt tight and he had a vague notion that he might be sick, because his body was remembering, all over again, that his dad was gone. His best mate. His loudest champion. Dead from a ruptured brain aneurysm.

They’d been drinking pints in the pub together before Sunday lunch, his dad telling Daniel he could help him with a flat deposit and not to worry about it, it wasn’t a loan it was a gift, he wanted to see him sorted and London property prices were so crazy now he’d never be able to do it alone. It was weird for a thirty-year-old to have a flatmate, his dad said – he’d had a kid and a wife by that age. Daniel had said he’d think about it, that he was a bit proud to accept a handout, that it was normal to be thirty and have a flatmate in London, it was an expensive place, he liked the company, and living in Kentish Town, and that afternoon, before he could accept and say, ‘Dad, I love you, cheers for looking out for me’, over the spicy bazargan at home his sixty-two-year-old dad had keeled over and had never woken up. In a single hour, everything was different and nothing was the same and Daniel had lost the man who’d made him.

Daniel made a break for it, after that phone call, turning on his heel with his head dipped down to cover his face, a face that was ashen and streaked with tears. He took the back stairs, all twenty-three flights of them, down to the ground floor, and pushed out of an emergency exit onto the street. He stood with his back against the wall, panting. He didn’t realize he’d started walking until he flopped down on a circular bench in the sun, drenched in sweat, somewhere off the market. He sat, closed his eyes, breathed deeply, let the tears and sweat dry, and thought about his dad, thought about how lonely he was, thought about how badly he’d been sleeping and how the insomnia might be the thing to drive him truly mad.

On the bench he’d had his back to her, at first. He’d been staring at nothing in particular, just sort of letting the sun be on his face and closing his eyes to do a bit of deep breathing, reminding himself that he would be okay. He didn’t call it a ‘mantra’ as such, but when he missed his dad in his bones he’d say in his head, ‘Be alive, and remember to live. Be alive, and remember to live. Be alive, and remember to live …’

He became vaguely aware of a voice just over his left shoulder getting louder and louder, and he tuned his ear into it like a radio dial finding a signal on a country road, until he could hear a woman’s voice clearly saying:

‘… Because it’s going to be built anyway, right? So it needs to be built by people who come from lower-class or lower-income families …’

That was what had made Daniel pay particular attention. He was the first in his family to go to university. His family was very modest. His dad had missed only three days of work as a postman in his forty-year tenure, putting Daniel through a degree with hardly any debt. It had been important to him that his child had the opportunities he hadn’t. The woman’s voice continued: ‘The only way artificial intelligence will ever look after poorer people is if people from these underprivileged communities are the ones programming it.’

As an engineer, Daniel had a small amount of knowledge of artificial intelligence, but not much. ‘The next industrial revolution,’ one of his undergrad professors had declared, but Daniel had preferred the known entities of maths and equations and building things for the now, not the future. Daniel craned over his shoulder a little to see who was talking. There was a guy – suit trousers with no belt, obviously fitted by a tailor to the exact drop of his hip, narrow pinstripe instead of plain black, shoes so shiny you could see your reflection in them – giving the girl a sort of wry look. A smirk.

‘I’m not sure about that …’ the wry-smile guy said.

Daniel didn’t like him at all. He looked like he was from the gang at university for whom everything had come easy. The good-looking guys with the athletic frames who didn’t play football or rugby but played tennis or lacrosse. They got pretty average grades but were the first ones to get above average jobs, because their families all knew other families who could put in a good word. Daniel had friends at university – good ones, who he still knew now – but they’d all grafted, all been the working-class kids whose accents got mysteriously broader in the company of the posh boys, as if to hold up their class difference as a shield instead of bowing to the pressure to act like they were from somewhere they weren’t. A small ‘fuck you’ to privilege.

Most posh boys were amused by it, and a couple even tried to befriend Daniel, but he always felt like it was a game to them. That them being ‘unable to see class’ meant they could acquire a friend from a working-class family who spoke with different vowels and it be a testament to their own character. But anyone who comes from very little money knows never to trust a bloke who says money doesn’t buy happiness. Money buys food and electricity and pays for a school jumper without holes in it so you don’t get picked on, and you can’t be happy without that.

The woman talking was smooth. She wasn’t losing her temper as she explained her theory to this loaded rich guy, but she was passionate. Cared.

‘We need kids from underprivileged communities being recruited directly so that they take this technology in the right direction. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of rich people making rich-people decisions that continue to screw over millions of people for not being rich – like literally, the gap between the haves and have-nots will get to the point where there will be a minimum net worth a person has to have to even be alive. It’s sickening. Sickening! But we can absolutely do something about it.’

Daniel loved what he was hearing. He loved this woman, with her unbrushed hair and crazy arms and rice burrito and big ideas about social responsibility. He thought, My dad would like her. He positioned himself at a bit more of an angle so he could see her.

The rich man held up his hands. ‘Okay, okay. Jesus, Nadia, you can have the fund. We’ll do something. I hear you.’ He shook his head, laughing. ‘I’ll talk to the board. Give me a month or so.’

Nadia – so that was her name – laughed too.

Daniel had stood up at that point, his Apple Watch buzzing on his wrist to remind him that he had a conference call with the Cape Town office in ten minutes. The geologists had analysed the surface structures of the new site and he needed their input to know what to do about the drilling problem. He knew he couldn’t miss it if they were to come in under budget – and Daniel’s USP was that he always under-promised and over-delivered. That’s why he could charge the day rate he did. He felt much better now anyway. Now that he knew this woman existed.

He made eye contact with her before he left. It felt like the bravest thing he’d done in months. She was beautiful and untamed. He stumbled a little, backing away from the pair, unsteady on his feet. She half watched him, looked at him for what could only have been half a second but felt like a full minute to Daniel, and then she turned back to Rich Man. Daniel felt like he’d been slapped by the Love Gods, and it wasn’t his dad he thought about as he walked through the doors of his office, but the woman.

‘She just had this … spirit,’ he said to Lorenzo, later on. ‘And no ring on her finger either. I checked.’

Lorenzo had laughed. ‘This is the first time you’ve seemed even vaguely excited by something since your dad, mate. I’m pleased for you.’ And then, in a lower, more serious voice: ‘You’ll never see her again, though, of course. Don’t get too carried away.’

5
Daniel

When Nadia got on Daniel’s train before work two days after he’d overheard her speak at the market, first he gave a word of thanks to the universe, or maybe his dad, or whoever was up there doing him this very solid favour, and then sent a swift gloating text to Lorenzo.

Had she been on the Northern line this whole time? (Yes.) Why was he only just noticing her now? (He had been in his own, grief-fuelled world.) He knew he had to do something about it. He hadn’t stopped thinking about her, and had even gone back to the same lunch spot the next week to see if she was a regular, which was a bit much but true nonetheless. She hadn’t been there, of course. It was a lot to expect she would be.

Seeing her on the train felt like being given a second chance at a first impression. He looked out for her the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that – greedily, he wanted his third chance, and his fourth. The tube trains were huge and there were so many people on the platform and he couldn’t be sure, obviously, that she hadn’t got on one of the others whizzing through the underground every morning. She could have been on the 7.28, or the 7.32, or the 8 a.m. or 6 a.m. People didn’t always stick to the same schedule like he did. Daniel was anally retentive in a lot of ways, and thrived off routine and certainty. But for Nadia to be on the same train as him, even that once? He decided to hold onto that as a sign.

In total he’d seen Nadia (though he actually couldn’t decide in his head what to call her. Nadia was her name, after all, but having not been formally introduced it seemed presumptuous, even in his imagination, to refer to her like that. But then, why would he call her ‘woman on the train’ when he knew her name? It was confusing, and mostly meant he just imagined her face and didn’t really call her anything) seven times, always around 7.30, always seeming a little frazzled in a ‘Working Woman with A Lot To Do’ kind of a way. Three of those times she’d been in his carriage, once he’d seen her on the platform at Angel, and three times he saw her on the escalator at London Bridge. Twice he thought he’d seen her in and around the general Borough Market area, but it hadn’t been her, it had only been wishful thinking.

When he did catch her, she always had her phone in her hand, but unlike a lot of other commuters, she didn’t wear headphones to listen to music as she travelled. Daniel knew if he spoke to her one day, out of the blue, at least she’d be able to hear him. But then, he didn’t want to screw up his one shot at getting to know her. He worried that simply striking up conversation on a crowded tube – a place notorious for how anti-conversation it could be, where even a smile could make you seem demented because it just isn’t the done thing – he’d seem slimy and pervy. A woman had every right to get to work without fending off advances from men who thought she was hot. He knew that. He wanted to give her a nod of encouragement so she could let him know if she was interested as well. It was Lorenzo who had joked that Missed Connections was the place to do it. Lorenzo was kidding around, but as soon as he’d suggested it, Daniel knew that was how he wanted to get this woman’s attention. He’d seen her reading the paper before. It could be just the ticket.

‘But why this woman?’ asked Lorenzo. ‘I don’t get it. You don’t know her!’

How could Daniel explain to Lorenzo that, above all else, he just had this feeling?

6
Nadia

‘Am I being crazy?’ Nadia asked. ‘I feel like I can’t put a message in as a response because it might not even be me. Can you imagine? He’s expecting bloody Daisy Lowe to respond, and he ends up with bloody ME?’

Emma was pushing a grilled peach around her plate, loading toasted hazelnuts and creamy goat’s curd onto her fork. She had summoned Nadia to In Bocca al Lupo because, yes, she had to review it imminently after an RnB star and her Saudi boyfriend were spotted eating at the bar two nights earlier and it had immediately become The Place to Be and her editor wanted it in Saturday’s paper, but also because, as she’d said in her text, In Bocca al Lupo means good luck! In Italian! And your grandmother was Italian and you need some good luck! It will be a good luck meal for love! It was a bizarre logic that suited only Emma’s mental gymnastics, especially because the restaurant itself wasn’t actually Italian, but Nadia couldn’t be bothered to go home and cook and, truly, if a singer with twelve Grammys and a sold-out arena tour was going to chow down on the wood-fired Torbay sole on a Friday evening, Nadia could sure as hell do the same thing the following Monday. Plus, Emma would be expensing it. It was something of a personal rule of Nadia’s to never turn down a free meal. In The New Routine to Change My Life she should, technically, have been at home with a face mask on, eating a salad and meditating, but that didn’t matter. She could do that tomorrow, and Monday had already been mostly a success.

‘Listen,’ Emma said, using her fork to gesticulate. ‘Awful Ben. What a bastard, yes?’

Nadia scowled at the mention of his name. ‘Yes,’ she said, slowly.

‘You deserve love, and happiness, and everything your heart desires. Yes?’

‘… Yes.’

‘Right then. You’ve got to make that happen for yourself. You’ve got to put yourself in the way of your own fate. You’ve got to write back – of course the advert was for you!’

They were interrupted by the delivery of a garlic, parsley and bone-marrow flatbread, from a waiter with dancing eyes and plucked eyebrows.

‘Compliments of the chef,’ he said, and Emma replied, ‘Thank you, darling.’

She only ever called service people darling, sort of as a way to ingratiate herself into their favour and because in the reviewing industry nobody wanted a reputation as a miserable or rude customer. But also, Nadia thought, you could tell a lot about a person by how they treated service people: waiters and cleaners and doormen. Emma’s manners were always impeccable, whatever the motivation, and it made Nadia like her friend even more.

‘Uh oh,’ Emma said. ‘You seem grumpy. Why are you grumpy?’ She used her hands to tear up the bread, and licked welts of seasoned oil off her fingers and wrists once she was done.

‘I’m not grumpy!’ said Nadia, too brightly. Emma raised her eyebrows, knowing the minor changes in her friend’s moods better than she knew her own.

‘I’m not grumpy! I just …’ Nadia took a big gulp of white wine. ‘Just don’t bring up Awful Ben that way, okay? I can. You can’t.’

Emma nodded. ‘Fair enough.’

‘And also, don’t talk to Gaby about me. It feels like you’re ganging up on me. I’m excited and I’m scared and I need to feel like you’re on my team, not a team together.’

‘Right,’ said Emma, wide-eyed. ‘I hear you. Though, let the record show we are all on a team together. Team Nadia.’

Nadia suddenly felt guilty that she’d said anything. That hadn’t been the right moment to bring up Emma and Gaby talking about her. The two women finished the flatbread and emptied their glasses in silence. Hats off to Emma, she knew when to shut up and let Nadia have a bit of a wobble. And, at some point – not now, but at some point – Nadia would probably have to mention to one of them that sometimes how close Gaby and Emma had become bothered her.

It had been cool that the first time Emma came to after-work drinks she’d taken to Gaby so well. Emma was typically the jealous one, wanting Nadia all to herself. A typical only child, unpractised at sharing. But it was like the phrase ‘house on fire’ had been designed especially for Gaby and Emma. Nadia had sat there more or less mute as the two swapped outrageous dating stories and entered into a flirting competition with the wait staff. They’d never graduated to hanging out without her, but every time Nadia invited one out, the first question would always be if the other one was coming. Nadia knew it was childish to feel envious over how they’d clicked, but … well. She was envious at how they’d clicked. She’d been trying to see them separately just lately. Not that she’d made that clear out loud or anything. She didn’t want to seem immature.

Nadia let her temper calm down so that by the time their starter plates had been cleared and Emma said, ‘I still think you should put an advert up in response,’ Nadia was able to relax into herself and smile. She knew her friend only wanted what was best for her.

‘No!’ Nadia said, laughing. ‘Oh god! I just don’t think I can!’

Emma was impatient. ‘How are we going to find him then?’

‘I don’t know! Maybe I don’t even want to find him!’

‘Well, that’s bollocks,’ said Emma. ‘You’re a shit liar and I can tell that’s a lie.’ She poured them both more wine. ‘I can tell you’re gagging for it to be you. Look at you! Texting all maybe it is me! all day and then being moody tonight. You’re afraid to be excited. I see you.’

‘Oh shut up,’ Nadia said light-heartedly.

‘You’re going to have to be on the lookout. Like, on that 7.30 train every morning, the end near the escalators. That’s where you should start. Stake the joint out a bit. If it is for you, surely there will be a guy hopefully looking at you, all “Notice me! Notice me!”’

Nadia giggled. ‘Well, yes. That I can do.’

She twisted at the napkin in her lap.

‘And – I’m sorry for snapping about Ben. He really was just … awful. He used such horrible mind games to make me doubt myself, and make myself smaller. I lost myself to him. I’m glad that relationship happened because fucking hell I learnt so much, but …’ She absentmindedly fiddled with the cloth. ‘He ruined me. My head knows love is real and not all men are so horrible, blah blah blah. But my body. It’s like muscle memory or something. I get tense just hearing his name.’

Emma nodded, understandingly. ‘That’s a thing, you know.’

‘Getting tense at somebody’s name?’

‘Yeah. Muscle memory is a thing. We store trauma in our muscles and that’s why we get pain in our bodies sometimes: it’s old wounds in the fibres of our being.’

Nadia didn’t really understand. Trauma in the fibres of her being? It wasn’t like Awful Ben had hit her or anything; although, one night, in a rage, he had hit himself, and the sound of it – thwack – had scared Nadia into knowing that if she didn’t leave she could be next. It started out as words, accusations and little niggles, but within a few weeks Nadia found she couldn’t breathe properly around him, and yet still felt like she couldn’t end it, that she was somehow bound to him. She was terrified to stay, but even more terrified to leave. She never thought she would be one of ‘those’ women, but it turned out there are no ‘those’ women – only ‘those’ men.

‘Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but there’s stuff you can do to let your body release like, bad memories. Really, really!’

Emma was exposed to all kinds of stuff through the paper she worked for. She’d once been silent speed dating where she had to do a slow dance to classical music, with a stranger, the only points of their body touching being one finger and with eye contact unbroken. She said it was the most erotic three minutes of her life. Or, another time, she’d ended up at a New Year’s Eve party with an ex-footballer who now sold bagels on the TV, and he offered her a threesome with his fiancée. Emma had said yes.

‘Emma, if this involves a woman fingering me in front of an audience I will actually kill you.’ That was another thing Emma had done – a Yoni love class that meant everyone had their vulva massaged by a teacher wearing a beaded kaftan and latex gloves. It was supposed to cleanse their energy and encourage deeper orgasms. Emma had orgasmed in front of an audience of six other women who’d paid £350 for the half-day workshop and who then afterwards took it in turns to hug her in congratulations.

‘Oh god,’ said Emma, ‘I’d never do that again. I think it was her herbal steam that gave me that recurring thrush, you know. No. This is just lolling about on mats in our Lululemon, but it works! Denise at work did it and said she cried in class and then got on with her life. That she really felt her energy shift. In fact – let me text her for the name.’

Nadia had never known anybody as interested in the ridiculous and the sublime as much as Emma. That was probably why they got on – Emma encouraged Nadia to experiment more, to be a little braver, and Nadia made Emma a little more thoughtful. She smiled at her friend as she texted, and looked out across the restaurant. It was almost full, and she lingered her gaze on a table of City boys across the room. It could be any one of them, she thought, surprising herself in her hopefulness. Literally, if it is for me, the guy who wrote it could be in this very room.

‘That guy could literally be anywhere, couldn’t he?’ she said, as much to herself as to Emma.

‘I’m telling you,’ Emma said, setting her phone back down on the table, screen-side down. ‘Write him back! You’ve got nothing to lose.’

Nadia hesitated. She didn’t. There was nothing to lose. Because if she wrote back and it actually wasn’t meant for her, the only person who would know was him. And they were strangers. Nadia could even laugh it off and say she thought she was writing to somebody else too. And if the guy turned out to be an axe-wielding serial killer who lived with his mother and had voted LEAVE, Nadia could simply deny she was the author of any return note. She could blame Emma. Feign total ignorance.

Emma bent down to her bag. ‘Hold on,’ she said, rustling through her stuff. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

She resurfaced with a notebook and two pens, victorious. Nadia watched her open it on a fresh page, and write in loopy cursive: ‘TRAIN GUY ADVERT’.

‘You’re really going to make me do this, aren’t you?’

‘Yup,’ said Emma, pen poised above the page. A waiter came and topped up their glasses. ‘We’ll have another bottle, please,’ Emma said to him. ‘I think my friend is going to need it.’ Nadia smiled at him weakly.

‘So. I’m thinking you should be direct about this,’ Emma said. ‘His advert contained a compliment, but wasn’t too sickly, and that was cute, right? That hit the right note?’

‘If it was for me,’ Nadia said.

‘If it was for you, his tone was just right, right?’

‘Well, we’re here still talking about it and thinking of writing back to him, so … yes. The boy did good.’

‘The man did good.’

‘Man, yes,’ said Nadia, not realizing how good it felt to make the distinction between man and boy. She was twenty-nine. She should be dating men. ‘And listen, I don’t want to sound too desperate or anything, though, you know? That’s important.’

‘Well, you’re not desperate, is the thing.’ Emma seemed to have a flash of inspiration, and she held up a finger as if to say, hold on! ‘What about …’ Emma started to scribble something down, smiling to herself. The waiter delivered a new bottle and asked if they wanted fresh glasses. Nadia said no, eager to get rid of him, in the nicest possible way, so she could see what Emma was writing. Emma passed the paper over to Nadia, who silently read: