Coralie had forgotten how much she disliked the phrase getting out of the house until Farah used it three times in one telephone call.
“I get out of the house every day. I have a business.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“The tax people think it does.”
“Put on something without loose threads attached. I’m collecting you at seven.”
Coralie nearly refused. Saturday evening contained too many possible versions of itself. In one, Gareth was wearing the suit she had refused to finish, smiling beside Verity at a hotel event. In another, she was sitting at home imagining that until bedtime. Neither seemed improved by being asked to name the capital of somewhere.
But Farah had promised to collect her, which meant she would also take her home. Coralie could survive two hours with an exit arranged.
She wore black pants and a green top that didn’t need ironing. In the mirror she looked like a woman going to a pub quiz, which was reassuringly specific.
Farah arrived carrying a bag of children’s clothes she had meant to return to somebody three weeks earlier. She threw it into the back seat and told Coralie not to ask.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You looked interested.”
“I looked at the bag.”
“That’s how it starts.”
The pub was crowded, warm and louder than Coralie remembered. Somebody had decorated the quizmaster’s table with paper stars. Farah pushed through to a corner where a man in a blue shirt was moving chairs around a small table.
Coralie stopped.
Stellan looked up.
“Oh,” Farah said. “You know each other?”
“His daughter’s dress.” Coralie heard how stiff she sounded.
Stellan held the chair he had been moving. “Hello.”
Farah looked from one to the other. “Good. That saves an introduction.”
It did not save Coralie the sensation of having been arranged. She turned on her friend.
“You didn’t say—”
“I didn’t know he’d be here. He sometimes plays with the people from the school garden project. They’ve abandoned him.”
“One’s got a stomach bug,” Stellan said. “The other one’s pretending not to be worried about catching it.”
“Can we join you?” Farah asked.
He looked at Coralie before answering. “If you’d like.”
She could still say no. The fact that he had made room for it helped.
“All right.”
He let her take the chair facing the room and sat opposite. Farah squeezed between the table and the wall, complaining that the pub furniture had been designed for people without bones.
They had to choose a team name. Farah proposed several unsuitable ones. Stellan suggested a name so literal that Coralie thought he was joking.
“Three People?” she said.
“There are three of us.”
“What happens if someone joins?”
“We’d need a new sheet.”
She laughed. He smiled, apparently pleased with himself.
They became Three People.
The first round was geography. Coralie knew two answers immediately and one with the absolute confidence that usually meant she was wrong.
“It’s definitely Quito.”
Stellan looked at the sheet. “The question says European.”
“I know. I meant—”
“European Quito,” Farah said, writing something else.
Coralie covered her face. “I should go home.”
“Not until the music round. You’re useful there.”
That word caught for half a second. Then the quizmaster asked the next question, and she had to listen instead of examining it.
Stellan was terrible at films. He described one as “the thing with the boat” and another as “the woman who goes back”, neither of which narrowed the possibilities enough for Farah. He was unexpectedly good at old dance music, tapping two fingers on the table before naming a song Coralie hadn’t heard in years.
“You know that?” she asked.
“Bryony went through a phase.”
“That came out before she was born.”
“Her phases weren’t in chronological order.”
The next clip was one Coralie had danced to in a friend’s kitchen at twenty. She named it before the chorus and found herself moving her shoulders in time.
Farah pointed her pen. “There she is.”
Coralie stopped moving.
Farah’s face changed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine.”
But Stellan was still tapping on the table, quietly off the beat, and somehow that allowed her to start again without it becoming evidence of recovery.
During the break Farah went to answer a call from home. Coralie watched her push through the crowd, then looked down at their answer sheet.
“We’re not doing very well.”
“We’ve got seven.”
“Out of twenty.”
“Seven more than if we’d stayed home.”
She gave him a look.
“That sounded better before I said it,” he admitted.
“It sounded like something printed on a mug.”
“A disappointing mug.”
She smiled and reached for her glass. The pale mark on her finger was visible in the light from the wall lamp. Stellan’s eyes moved to her hand, then away so quickly she almost missed it.
She could wait for him to ask. He probably wouldn’t. She could let the mark sit between them like another answer neither of them knew.
“My engagement ended last week.”
He put his pen down.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes.” She looked toward the bar. “I thought I’d say it. In case you were wondering about the ring.”
“I noticed it had gone. I wasn’t going to ask.”
“I know.”
A burst of laughter came from the next table. She felt briefly furious with them, then remembered she had been laughing herself ten minutes earlier.
“Does Bryony know?” he asked.
“No. It wasn’t relevant to her fitting.”
“No.” He paused. “I won’t tell her.”
“Thank you.”
He didn’t ask whose decision it had been. She appreciated that, though some angry part of her wanted to make the facts clear immediately, to establish that she hadn’t done anything wrong. She was tired of needing witnesses.
“I might be poor company,” she said.
“You’ve been very competitive.”
“That isn’t the same as good company.”
“It is if we’re going to lose.”
She looked at him properly. His shirt was open at the neck, the sleeves rolled without much care. There was a small scratch along one forearm. She noticed his hands, broad and still beside the answer sheet, and then she noticed herself noticing.
Farah returned, exasperated about a missing school permission form. The break ended. Coralie was grateful for the question about rivers.
Farah caught her at the bar before the final round, while Stellan was returning their sheet.
“I didn’t arrange that,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
“You looked as if you thought I had.”
“I did think you had.”
“And now?”
Coralie watched him at the quizmaster’s table. He was explaining something with one finger on the paper, then laughing when the quizmaster shook his head. He didn’t look toward her to see whether she had noticed.
“Now I think you wouldn’t have chosen someone with such poor knowledge of cinema.”
Farah followed her gaze and smiled. Coralie turned back immediately.
“Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re being loud with your eyebrows.”
Her friend tried to flatten her expression, which made it worse. Then she grew serious.
“You don’t have to make tonight into anything.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
The bartender set down their drinks. Coralie reached for her wallet, but Farah had already paid. Ordinarily she would have argued; tonight she picked up both glasses and let her friend carry the smaller one.
As they returned, a man squeezed past and knocked Coralie’s elbow. Stellan caught the sliding glass before it reached the edge of the table. A little spilled onto his hand.
“Oh, sorry.” She grabbed a napkin.
“Not your fault.”
She took his wet hand without thinking, pressing the napkin against his fingers. Then she realized what she was doing and let go.
He said thank you as though nothing unusual had happened. Under the table, her knee bumped Farah’s. Her friend wisely kept her eyebrows to herself.
By the last round they had moved from near the bottom to respectably below the middle. Farah wanted to gamble their remaining points on a question about birds.
“We don’t know anything about birds,” Coralie said.
“I know several personally.”
Stellan was looking at the ceiling. “I’ve got this one.”
He did not have it. He named the wrong bird with quiet conviction, and Farah wrote it down before Coralie could object.
When the answer was announced, he stared at the sheet as though the quizmaster had changed the rules of nature.
“I’ve been calling them that for years.”
“They haven’t complained,” Farah said.
Coralie laughed until she had to put down her glass. It wasn’t dignified laughter. She bent over the table, one hand against her ribs, while Stellan watched with a mixture of embarrassment and pleasure.
“I’m glad my ignorance is helping.”
“It really is.”
They finished seventeenth. There were nineteen teams. Farah announced this was better than last time, which Stellan said depended on how many teams there had been last time.
“Do you want to walk home?” she asked him.
“I probably should stop asking questions.”
Outside, the air was cool enough to raise bumps along Coralie’s bare wrists. Farah checked her phone again and swore.
“I have to go straight home. The form’s in my bag, apparently. It has to be signed tonight for something tomorrow that nobody thought to mention.”
“I can walk,” Coralie said.
“I said I’d drive you.”
“It’s fifteen minutes.”
Farah hesitated. Coralie could see the calculation: friend in distress, children in chaos, one car. She wanted to release her from it without sounding brave.
“Go. I’ll text when I’m home.”
Stellan said, “I’m going that way. As far as Market Street.”
Farah looked at Coralie, and Coralie wished she would stop looking as though every ordinary decision required supervision.
“That would be nice,” she said to him.
Farah hugged her, too briefly for comfort and too warmly to resent. Then she hurried toward the car, searching the enormous bag for keys she had put in her coat pocket.
For the first few yards they talked about the quiz. It was easy material. Stellan maintained that the bird question had been misleading. Coralie said it had only been misleading if one didn’t know the answer.
“That covers most questions.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
At the crossing he waited for her rather than putting a guiding hand on her back. She was absurdly aware of the space where his hand might have been.
“Do you go often?” she asked.
“Every few weeks. When someone needs a person who knows nothing about films.”
“I used to go with Farah more.”
She stopped there. The rest of the sentence belonged to Gareth, to weekends arranged around hotel shifts and the belief that being flexible was a kind of intimacy. She didn’t want to hand over the whole history on a sidewalk.
Stellan seemed to accept the unfinished sentence.
“How’s the dress?”
“Still in one piece.”
“That’s a good start.”
“It will be in more pieces on Wednesday.”
He winced, then laughed at himself. “Don’t tell Bryony I did that.”
“I might charge for silence.”
“I’d understand.”
They passed her studio. The display light was on a timer, illuminating a cream jacket and a small arrangement of fabric swatches. She stopped to check the door handle out of habit.
“Do you make all of it?” he asked.
“Most of what goes in the window. Most of what pays the rent comes through the door already made.”
“Do you prefer one?”
She looked at the jacket. “Yes.”
He waited.
“I’d rather make more things from the beginning. But it’s difficult to ask people to want something that doesn’t exist yet.”
Stellan considered this. “I have that problem with gardens.”
“Do you?”
“People want to see the tree before we plant the tree.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“It is. They also want it to be twenty years old next Thursday.”
She smiled. He looked pleased to have earned it without anyone making a joke about her ex.
At the end of the street their routes separated. She knew he had already walked farther than he needed to. He knew she knew, judging by the way he looked at the signpost.
“Thank you for joining the losing team.”
“Thank you for not saying we did our best.”
“We didn’t. You put Quito.”
“I’ll never be allowed to forget that.”
“Probably not.”
There was a pause. A car passed, its headlights moving across his face. Coralie tucked her hands into her pockets because she didn’t know where else to put them.
“Would you like a coffee sometime?” he asked. “Not now. Obviously. It’s late.”
She looked at him.
“Just coffee,” he added, then frowned. “That sounded worse.”
“It sounded like coffee.”
“All right.”
Her first impulse was to explain why she couldn’t promise anything. Her second was to ask what he meant. Both seemed too heavy for the narrow, pleasant thing he had offered.
“If we’re both around,” she said.
“We probably will be. It’s a small town.”
She smiled again. “Goodnight, Stellan.”
“Goodnight.”
At home she texted Farah before taking off her shoes. Then she stood in the bedroom doorway, where her unfinished wedding dress hung behind the wardrobe door, and let the evening become complicated again.
She had enjoyed herself. She had wanted a man’s hand at her back. She had cried in this same room that morning.
The phone lit.
Farah: Did he get you home?
Coralie typed, We walked part of the way. Then, after a moment, He asked about coffee.
Three dots appeared immediately.
She put the phone facedown before the reply arrived and went to wash her face, smiling despite herself at the thought of a man who had been misidentifying birds for years.