Dominic’s arrival barely dents the noise, but the temperature of it alters; a fraction more pointed laughter, an extra beat before someone finishes a sentence. He feels the pause land on his shoulders anyway, that half‑second inventory everyone takes. What he’s wearing, how tired he looks, whether he’s brought anyone. The answer to that last one is as obvious as the empty space at his side.
“Shut that door, Dom, you’ll let all the heat out,” someone calls, as if the house is in danger of losing its only asset. He nudges it with his heel, shoulders braced against the familiar damp chill of the hallway and the unfamiliar concentration of eyes. His dad glances up from the end of the table, quick and sharp, then down again at his plate as if Dominic is a late delivery rather than a son who’s driven an hour and a half to get here.
The chair with the freed‑up carrier bag remains technically unoccupied but emotionally reserved: a staging post for coats, handbags and those who haven’t yet earned a permanent seat. Dominic leaves it where it is. He skims a palm over the back in passing, a minor act of claim that no one acknowledges. Someone’s dumped a supermarket trifle there as well, condensation slick on its plastic lid; the chair creaks a protest under the weight of family dessert and unresolved seating hierarchies.
He edges sideways behind Will, who doesn’t look up from his phone but swivels his hips half an inch, the universal gesture of male kinship: I’ve seen you, that’ll do. Dominic catches a glimpse of the screen (graphs, numbers, an email with “URGENT” in the subject line) and files it away with everything else he isn’t asking about.
The table talk rolls on over his head: house prices in the next town over, somebody’s neighbour’s new car, a cousin’s promotion in Leeds. Each detail is lobbed like proof that escape is not only possible but measurable, preferably in monthly repayments. Dominic notes who’s giving the examples and who’s nodding a little too eagerly. He knows this game; it’s less conversation than performance review.
Steam ghosts around the yellowed strip‑light, slicking his fringe to his forehead. The chip‑fat tang is comfort and accusation both. Every childhood Friday night, every argument conducted over plates of cooling food. His boots stick faintly to the lino with each step, announcing him; there’s no way to arrive quietly here, no graceful drift into the background. Every scuff is an entry in the ledger of his presence.
He drops his overnight bag under the sideboard, between the good shopping trolley and a crate of discount cola, sealing his temporary return with the soft thud of canvas against skirting board. There, then. He’s back. Whether the room chooses to fully admit it or not.
The space has its own invisible grid, a floorplan everyone’s absorbed by osmosis rather than instruction. Older relatives root themselves around the table like permanent fixtures, elbows planted, mugs ring‑staining the PVC cloth in slow, brown constellations. Coats slung over chair backs turn into territorial flags: this place is taken, this person matters enough to have an anchor.
Those who’ve been “on their feet all day” orbit the kettle and the oven in a well‑practised dance, bumping hips and trading pans without looking, each clatter of lid and hiss of steam a punctuation mark in a story they’ve been telling for thirty years. You don’t step into that orbit unless you’ve earned your history there. Dominic knows better than to try.
Kids are shooed back toward the front room every time they drift in, the flicker of the TV bleeding under the kitchen door like a low‑status sunset. Occasionally a small shape squeezes through the gap at Dominic’s side, testing whether the adults’ world has softened since last time, and is promptly redirected with a tea‑towel flap and a “mind the plates, love.”
Status is mapped out in micro‑territories so familiar no one thinks to question them. The strip of lino by the fridge where Will props himself is granted diplomatic immunity because he’s “busy with work stuff,” thumb flicking over his screen like that alone justifies the square footage. The clear run of worktop Marnie has claimed with one hip might as well be a raised platform; mugs and plates are nudged aside so her ankles can swing, audience pre‑arranged in a semicircle.
Dominic, too solid for the slivers of space left over and not yet rehabilitated enough for a permanent chair, ends up braced against the washing machine. The spin‑cycle thrum vibrates through his spine as people squeeze past, treating him as an inconvenient but familiar piece of white goods.
Nobody needs directing; bodies drift, almost gratefully, back into their allotted parts. An uncle tilts his plate one‑handed to admit a fresh dish, anecdote unbroken. An aunt slews her chair to face whoever currently owns the laugh. New arrivals are filed on sight: Lena, dispatched with a fond flap to the spare chair by the wall; Ryan, parked in a politely visible, tactically harmless berth beside the fruit bowl, close enough to be useful, not so close as to displace anyone that counts.
Conversation ebbs and flares to the rhythm of the kettle. Every time it boils, voices lift to out‑shout the hiss, then dip as cups are pressed into hands like rations. Sugar bowls migrate toward whoever’s holding court; the person nearest the teabags is, briefly, the room’s conductor. With Marnie stationed there, topping up, teasing, and allocating refills, the whole kitchen lists subtly in her direction.
Hierarchies show up first in who shifts their weight, not who bows. Dominic’s dad doesn’t haul himself up for Sebastian, but he does lean forwards, thumb jabbing the remote to nudge the football commentary down a notch; in this house, that’s as close to a curtsy as anyone’s getting. The set stays on, volume a faint murmur under the clatter of teaspoons, like a reminder that while some posh lad in cashmere has wandered in, the Premier League still outranks him.
Dominic clocks it the way he clocks a misaligned wheel: tiny adjustment, tells you everything. His dad hasn’t stood up for anyone since the vicar came about Nan’s funeral, but he’ll grant Sebastian audibility. That’s a concession, in Harlow terms. Respect, but on probation.
Around the table, spines straighten in degrees. An older uncle, who didn’t bother looking up when Dominic arrived beyond a grunt and a “You’re blocking the telly, lad,” now angles his chair a fraction so his knees face Sebastian rather than the screen. Not a full pivot (no one’s daft enough to turn their back on a potential goal) but a polite half‑offer of engagement. In another life it might count as a bow from the waist.
Even the kids adjust. A teenage cousin, previously sprawled like roadkill across two dining chairs, contracts into one and plants his trainers under the table. It’s rebellion to sit up for your own parents; for a stranger with an expensive watch, apparently, you discover posture.
Dominic feels the weight of it in the gaps left for him. No one thinks to turn the telly down when he walks in, only when he might be embarrassed by the shouting. For Sebastian, they soften the room. For Dominic, the room expects him to harden to fit.
One aunt reaches automatically for the “good” mug, the one without a hairline crack, with the matching saucer normally ring‑fenced for birthdays, funerals, and visits from anyone with a degree, and sets it in front of Sebastian as if it’s obvious it belongs there. It doesn’t even pass through the general circulation of crockery first; it goes straight from the high shelf to his place, one fluid movement that says the decision was made before he stepped over the threshold.
She doesn’t ask how he takes his tea. She doesn’t ask if he wants tea. She assumes: proper brew, strong, milk in first because that’s what they’ve read posh people do, and two sugars, the way you do for people important enough that you’d rather risk getting it slightly wrong than admit you don’t know. The saucer is slid under his hand with a little extra care, as though a careless clink might chip not porcelain but opportunity. Around them, nobody comments; this is how status is served here, quietly, with the best cup, before anyone has spoken a word.
Dominic, dripping from the drive and still smelling faintly of petrol and wet tarmac, gets handed whatever mug’s nearest the sink: a chipped cartoon seagull with the glaze worn thin round the beak and the handle a bit too hot to hold. The tea inside is stewed to the colour of creosote and sloshed in without ceremony. No one’s being cruel; it’s just logistics. He’s expected to fold back into the wallpaper of the house he left, to take up his old place in the chipped‑mug rota as naturally as breathing.
Sebastian gets the high‑shelf porcelain because he’s new and glossy; Dominic gets the seagull because he’s assumed to be impervious. You don’t risk your best china on people you already own.
Will, propped against the fridge like a man between flights, thumbs and scrolls with impunity, the blue glow flickering over his jaw. His notifications ping, hum, bloom across his face like evidence of importance. When one of the teenagers sneaks a phone out under the table, an aunt snaps their name sharp as a drawer slam (“Not at the table, pet!”) and the kid flinches, shoving it away, cheeks reddening. Will doesn’t even look up; his screen keeps lighting, sanctified by the word work.
All of it tallies in the room’s quiet ledger: whose comfort is anticipated before they speak, whose interruptions are christened “just busy,” who’s permitted to sag with exhaustion and who must glow with gratitude. Deference here isn’t dramatic; it’s calibrated in volume and crockery, allotted like sugar in the tea, banked like pension credits nobody quite trusts will ever pay out.
At the table’s head, Dominic’s dad presides with the weary authority of a man who’s kept the meter topped up through strikes, price hikes and three recessions, and expects that to count for something. His seat isn’t merely where he happens to land; it’s a small, upholstered monarchy, worn into the precise shape of his back and decisions. Nobody has ever been formally told not to sit there, but no one does. Even visiting boyfriends learn fast. When kids were little, they’d hover at the edge of the chair as if it might bite; now, grown, they simply orbit it, perching on arms of sofas, leaning on doorframes, leaving that one patch of vinyl at the table’s far end untouched until he lowers himself into it with the small grunt of a man clocking in.
The chair anchors more than him. It pins the whole room to a familiar axis: cooker, sink, table, Dad. When conversations fog into overlapping weather, Will’s schemes, Marnie’s stories, somebody’s complaint about parking on the front, eyes still flick back, almost unconsciously, to the man at the head as if to confirm that the tide of words hasn’t swept the foundations away. His presence functions as a kind of domestic barometer: a raised eyebrow counts as a storm warning, a small huff of amusement as safe sailing. The years have marked him in subtle ways but his jurisdiction remains unchallenged.
Dominic feels it as soon as he steps in: that old gravitational pull of the chair and the man in it, the sense that every route through the room must acknowledge that fixed point. It is not reverence, exactly; more like a long accustoming to the fact that the person who’s paid every gas bill gets to decide when it’s too cold to open the back door.
To his right, Marnie operates as the house’s charismatic foreign secretary, translating between Seabridge and “Elsewhere” with the fluency of someone who has long held dual citizenship. She spins tales of client meetings and city brunch spots into something the room can digest, stripping out acronyms, rounding off salaries, changing “pitch deck” to “presentation” and “brand alignment workshop” to “bit of a chat in a meeting room.” When she says “my team,” she throws in a self‑deprecating eye‑roll so it sounds like a slightly over‑enthusiastic shift rota rather than managerial authority. Her commute and promotions are presented as mildly inconvenient export duties (long trains, awkward bosses, “nothing fancy, honestly”) rather than a quiet escape route that begins, every Monday at dawn, at Seabridge station.
She paces her stories with an instinct for domestic tariff: one joke at her own expense for every hint of success, one anecdote of metropolitan absurdity for every small inquiry about someone else’s kids or shifts. The older women nod, the younger cousins lean in, and Dominic, listening from the edge, hears every omission as loudly as every boast.
By the doorway, Sebastian takes up his station with the unhurried certainty of a man who has never once had to ask where he’s allowed to stand. His cashmere and his carefully casual lean form a kind of velvet rope across the threshold; people edge past him sideways, murmuring “Sorry, love,” as if skirting a priceless vase. His vowels, long and polished, introduce a different exchange rate on confidence: remarks addressed to him arrive with an extra clause of explanation, an apologetic laugh, a quick translation of “on the sick” into “off work at the moment.” Aunties smooth their tops without seeming to, uncles sit up straighter; even the TV seems to lower itself a notch, as though the room has acquired a dress code.
Half‑blocking the fridge as if guarding the national reserves, Will styles himself minister for enterprise, phone face‑down but never out of jurisdiction. He peppers the air with talk of “scale,” “pipelines” and “cashflow visibility,” as though the ketchup shelf were a venture fund, while the clink of teaspoons and the rattle of the washer mark the actual economy he is desperate to transcend and rebrand.
Against the back wall, Lena operates as a one‑woman think‑tank, filing throwaway remarks and sideways glances as case studies, her fingers idly worrying the edge of a napkin like a page marker. Ryan, meanwhile, seeps into any spare chair with practised ease, dispensing small, precisely calibrated reassurances until stray aunts begin citing him as policy.
Dominic, wedged between the fridge and a leaning tower of old takeaway tubs, feels the brittle plastic dig into his shoulder every time someone nudges past, a small, repetitive reprimand each time he dares to occupy molecules wanted by other people. The stack lists ominously whenever a passing hip or elbow brushes it, producing a faint, squeaky protest that makes him instinctively put out a steadying hand: because of course if anything’s going to go flying, he’ll be the one blamed for it.
It’s his usual non‑spot, the position he has somehow always found himself drafted into: half in the room and half in the way, close enough to be summoned but not central enough that anyone thinks to make a space for him to actually sit. A human extension of countertop, he thinks, a sort of temporary shelf with opinions.
He has to angle his shoulders so the fridge door can still open; every time someone reaches past him for milk or butter, he flattens himself against the tubs, pretending not to mind the cold brush of metal against his front. The magnets on the fridge (faded donkeys, a chipped Blackpool Tower, a novelty pint glass with “Best Dad” rubbed to “Bes D”) tick against his arm when the door swings shut. One of his old school photos, trapped beneath a pizza coupon, stares out at him with its sullen thirteen‑year‑old glower, as if to confirm that yes, he has always been precisely here.
The position offers a decent line of sight, at least. From this narrow strip of lino he can watch the whole domestic theatre, unseen enough that people forget to keep their faces on. He clocks Marnie’s brief eye‑flick toward Will’s phone whenever it buzzes; the way Will’s jaw tightens half a second before the easy grin reappears; the slight pause before his dad laughs at one of Sebastian’s remarks, like he’s checking whether it’s supposed to be funny.
Every now and then someone remembers he exists and fires a question over like a stray dishcloth (“So you still in Brum then, Dom?” “You got much on at work?”) and he fields them with the same practiced, economical movements he uses under a bonnet: minimum fuss, nothing extra left lying around. Answers short enough not to invite follow‑ups, long enough not to be labelled rude.
The tubs at his back smell faintly of old curry and washing‑up liquid, ghosts of Friday nights and “couldn’t be bothered to cook.” He remembers which logos go with which lean years, which special offers marked which redundancies, who’d been off sick when they ordered too much and ate leftovers all week. Other people’s nostalgia lives in framed photos; his is laminated in cracked plastic and greaseproof paper, stacked in precarious columns by the fridge.
Someone jostles him again and he shifts a fraction, a micro‑adjustment that keeps the tubs upright and the fridge accessible and himself exactly where he always is: available, peripheral, holding the line between chaos and order with his shoulder and saying nothing about it.
From here he can hear the boiler’s intermittent cough beneath the clatter of pans: a stuttering little choke in the rumble that tells him the pump’s on its last warning. Nobody else seems to notice; they ride over it with talk of mortgage rates and motorway traffic, while he counts the beats between splutters the way other people follow a chorus. If he went down into the cellar cupboard now, he’d know exactly which panel to thump, which valve to twist half a turn, how much longer they could put off calling someone who’d overcharge them.
His body recognises the fault before his brain finishes labelling it. The sound slots into a private catalogue: like the hum of the old freezer when it’s about to ice up, the faint wheeze in the extractor fan, the particular whine in his dad’s breath when the stairs have been too much. It’s all part of the same muscle memory. The house has written itself into him over years, into his ears, his hands, his step on the narrow stairs, whether he ever meant to let it or not.
The familiarity tugs at him even as it prickles, a hand on the back of his neck that can’t decide whether it’s a pat or a shove. Every time an aunt’s gaze strays his way his shoulders inch up another degree. Uncles throw out half‑joking probes about “big plans” and “settling down somewhere decent now,” their voices light, their eyes anything but. He keeps his answers clipped, trimmed down to safe nouns and non‑committal verbs, eyes on the kettle or the lino or the crack in the ceiling over the doorway. He tries to flatten himself into background noise, a piece of kitchen equipment, and fails.
Somewhere between the steam and the chatter he notices how embarrassingly modest his real wishes are. A proper brew he can drink sitting down instead of half‑perched; five uninterrupted minutes where nobody is silently totting up his choices; the luxury of talking about spark plugs or the football or the weather. Anything that isn’t a polite audit of where he’s been and where he’s going.
Beneath that, quieter and more treacherous, runs the wish for a future that isn’t a closing statement: to be able to pack his tools and go without the street treating it as proof he never gave a toss, or to stay without it reading like he’s lowered his sights. He folds the thought away, neat as the Tupperware lids by his elbow, and contents himself with the mug.
Dominic feels it more than thinks it at first. A change in the room’s weather, a pressure in the air like the moment before someone asks for a lift to the tip and promises it’ll be “just one run.” It’s there in the way conversations bend around him, in how people say his name a fraction too brightly, as if testing how easily it might slot back into daily use.
His dad’s eyes keep doing a small, infuriating triangle: plate, Dominic, the empty chair by the window. Back again. As if staring might conjure a version of his son that chooses the chair, then the town, then a life that can be measured in repeat prescriptions and familiar shopkeepers. Every time Dominic moves, the chair seems to wait.
The code is simple enough; he grew up fluent. “Nice to have you back,” from his dad, is heavy with oblique clauses: You could stay, you know. Doctors are here. Family’s here. We’re not getting any younger. It’s all there, tucked into the tightness around his father’s mouth, in the way his hand pauses over his fork like the answer might be written on the gravy.
Other phrases join the chorus. “Good to see you about,” from an uncle in the doorway: You won’t find better than this, you daft sod. “You look well on it,” from an aunt topping up potatoes: So it can’t have been that bad, whatever you’re not telling us. Each benign remark lands on him with a quiet, bureaucratic weight, as though someone somewhere is updating a file.
He sips his tea and lets the script play out, giving the correct half‑smiles and throat noises. They want a decision framed as a compliment. He hears the offer but also the condition beneath it: staying is responsibility, leaving again is betrayal. Neither option, he suspects, comes with a clean receipt.
Will’s attention comes in glances, not words: the quick swivel of his phone screen whenever Dominic’s gaze strays that way, the automatic, slightly too–loud laugh that arrives a beat late whenever someone mentions “work going well then?” His patter about “scaling up” and “new revenue streams” sharpens at once if an older relative drifts within earshot; suddenly there are “pipelines” and “Q4 projections” where a second ago he’d been muttering about a courier not turning up.
Dominic clocks the tells (the tapping thumb, the jaw grinding behind the grin) and files them under Things We’re Not Admitting In Front Of Nan.
When Will finally hooks two fingers into Dominic’s sleeve and hauls him into the narrow hallway on the pretext of fetching more drinks, the pitch is already half‑assembled, words rattling like loose screws. “You and me, mate, proper little setup… you know cars, I know numbers, local lads done good, yeah?” The pauses are for effect, but also for courage. Dominic can almost see the unspoken appendix hanging off every sentence: and you’ve still got a half‑decent credit score, haven’t you, and no one round here knows what went wrong last time.
Back in the kitchen, Marnie hooks an elbow through Dominic’s and steers him neatly into circulation, as if he were a slightly temperamental trolley that only she knows how to manoeuvre. She dredges up their teenage escapades with a curatorial care that would have impressed a museum board, polishing the petty rebellions until they gleam as harmless colour. Where he remembers slammed doors and weeks of not speaking, she offers the room “our Dom, always a law unto himself,” with a fond eye‑roll that invites indulgent laughter.
She edits on the fly, clipping out the rows that lasted months, skipping lightly over the year he vanished, smoothing each memory until it supports a single, reassuring thesis: he was just a bit wayward, needed time to sort himself out. Every laugh at his old sulks, every “See, he’s not that bad really” is laid like smoke, drifts of narrative thick enough to obscure the present tense. No one asks what he’s doing now in any detail; they are too busy enjoying the backstory she’s framed for them.
Her own timeline, meanwhile, is subjected to the opposite treatment: aggressively present‑tense, aggressively vague. “Work’s mad at the minute,” she says, never mentioning the city that might soon replace this one, or the date in her calendar when an answer has to be given. Questions about “next year” slide off her like steam on the window. “We’ll see,” and “Oh, who knows,” and “Nothing’s decided,” form a soft barricade. She flinches away from the future the moment it threatens to acquire coordinates.
Dominic, who has spent enough time in MOT bays to recognise when something is being artfully taped over rather than fixed, feels the shape of it even as he plays along. She needs him not redeemed exactly, but in active renovation: messy yet improving, a cautionary tale retooled as a minor success story. If Dominic can be paraded as proof that people come back wiser, calmer, ready to settle, then she buys herself a window in which no one thinks to ask why her eyes keep flicking towards the door whenever talk turns to mortgages and school catchment areas.
In Marnie’s version of events, his chaos is a useful decoy. While the room busies itself re‑filing Dominic, from lost cause to late bloomer, nobody notices the suitcase quietly assembling in the spare room of her mind: the saved tabs for overseas flats, the browser history of visa requirements, the mental inventory of which possessions could be left in Mum’s loft “for now.” She laughs, squeezes his arm, and keeps him where she wants him (in the foreground, untidy but improving) so that her own potential exit can remain, for a few more hours at least, comfortably out of shot.
Sebastian watches all this from his patch of floor like a man comparing samples, weighing textures. His compliments on the “character” of Seabridge and the “rootedness” of families like Dominic’s are deployed with surgical politeness, never quite sincere, always looping back to the stability he himself represents: inherited money, a mortgage‑free London flat, the kind of LinkedIn job title that makes uncles nod and aunts say “He’ll do.” When his gaze lands on Dominic, it carries a faint, almost benevolent challenge. An invitation to acknowledge the terms of an unspoken contest in which one of them already owns property, the right vowels, and, for now, Marnie’s public allegiance.
Ryan, by contrast, slides in sideways; his interest is padded in professional calm and low‑stakes questions about how long Dominic’s “thinking of sticking around,” as if he were a fixed‑term product coming to market. He offers to “tidy up” an aunt’s old store‑card balances, translates a bit of pension jargon for Dominic’s dad, and in between lets his knee brush Dominic’s under the table just long enough to register, then retreat. He makes no demands, not yet, only sketches the outline of a different sort of future: one with contracts properly read, tempers de‑escalated before they flare, and an exit clause if it all goes wrong so no one has to slam a door and disappear.
Lena sits slightly apart, notebook still in her bag, asking Dominic about work and “being away” in a tone that sounds like simple catching up; but the way she goes quiet once he starts, the way her eyes flick to his hands when he talks about engines and night drives up the A19, betrays the scholar quietly shelving his answers under a heading she hasn’t yet dared name aloud.
Dominic becomes dimly aware that he, too, is being weighed and measured; every casual “How’s work these days then?” lands with the dull, echoing thud of a CV hitting the wrong desk. Nobody asks what he likes about it, or if he’s happy. They ask about “security,” about “hours,” about “prospects,” in that tone which suggests they already know the answers and are merely assembling evidence for the file marked Dominic, Still Not Quite Sorted.
He answers in short, functional sentences (garages, contracts, diagnostics, a bit of freelance breakdown work) only to hear his own words translated on the fly into narratives about “stability” and “finally getting his head down.” An aunt pronounces, with the cheerful brutality of someone who has never left Langley Street, that “There’s good money in cars if you play it right,” as if his entire adult life were a board game he had so far declined to read the instructions for.
Opposite him, Marnie is mid‑flow on “clients in Berlin,” a phrase that appears to function as both spell and passport. She never quite explains what these clients do, or what she does for them; the geography alone does most of the work. Berlin, like London and “the continent,” is accepted as shorthand for sophistication, for a life lived among airports and expense claims rather than rotas and shift swaps. An uncle nods, gratified, as if she’s just confirmed that somewhere on a map, a small flag reading OUR MARNIE has been planted on behalf of the family.
Sebastian chuckles at the right beats, a low, appreciative sound that suggests he understands all the unspoken implications and approves of them. His cufflinks flash as he lifts his glass, wordless punctuation to Marnie’s anecdote. Dominic notices how little Sebastian actually says, how much is achieved by posture and fabric and the calm assumption that the room will lean towards his silence as readily as towards other people’s noise. In that moment, Dominic feels not just underqualified but under‑captioned, as though everyone else has arrived pre‑labelled, STABLE, AMBITIOUS, INTERNATIONAL, while he’s still shelved under Miscellaneous: Local Lad, Pending Classification.
Will, parked by the fridge like a makeshift drinks sponsor, scatters phrases such as “scaling up” and “diversifying revenue streams” into the steam‑thick air the way his dad once talked about overtime and double shifts: with the same stubborn faith that more hours, more effort, must eventually alchemise into more money. Where the older man used to thump the table and say “Time‑and‑a‑half this Saturday,” Will waves his phone instead, its screen angled just so, the glow of graphs and unread emails serving as neon backing vocals to his monologue.
He scrolls as he speaks, thumbs twitching, each upward flick like a magician’s flourish meant to distract from the absence of actual rabbits. “We’re in a growth phase,” he tells an uncle, “leveraging the brand,” to an aunt, the jargon sliding over the Formica like spilt lager. His voice only cracks once, when someone, an older cousin, already half‑lost to the TV, asks, too bluntly, “So when d’you actually see any money from all that, then?” The question hangs there, heavy as chip‑shop grease, and for a beat Will’s graphs look suspiciously like flatlines.
At the far end of the table, Dominic’s dad runs a slow eye over Sebastian’s cashmere and Ryan’s neat blazer, over Lena’s ink‑smudged fingers curled round her glass and Dominic’s cuffs still bearing a faint grey crescent where the Swarfega gave up. It has the air of an inspection parade, different regiments of respectability assembled under his strip‑light. He clears his throat, the room obligingly dimming a notch, and remarks that “there’s nowt wrong with a proper trade,” in the tone of a man offering both blessing and warning. The line lands somewhere between reassurance and rebuke; Dominic can’t tell if he’s being defended against the room, excused to it, or gently filed back under What We Are, Not What We Fancy Being.
Lena, half‑turned toward the wall of school photos, finds herself mentally annotating the room like a field site: who laughs too loudly at Sebastian’s soft jokes, who deferentially offers Ryan more roast potatoes, who visibly relaxes when Dominic talks about MOTs instead of markets. Columns form in her head, data, themes, emerging codes. She bites back the impulse to phrase it as “competing narratives of success”, no one here volunteered to be a case study, and instead throws in a self‑deprecating story about the mould in her tiny rented flat and the grant that still hasn’t come through. The table snorts in recognition, levelling the playing field just enough that an aunt mutters, with quiet satisfaction, “Ah, so it’s not all glamour then.”
Ryan, meanwhile, listens with polite concentration, nodding at mentions of ISA limits and mortgage rates, but times his contributions carefully: one neatly packaged explanation of fixed versus variable interest here, one sympathetic “it’s all a bit of a racket, really” there. Each comment nudges him a fraction closer to being filed mentally alongside Sebastian in the “safe, sensible men” category: except that when he turns to Dominic, his tone lightens and the jargon drops away, as if proposing an alternative script meant for an audience of one, an easy sotto voce about cars rather than capital, about “getting breathing space” rather than “optimising liquidity,” his glance asking permission to step, very slightly, out of character.
The carrier bag of extra chips lands on the table with a greasy rustle, vinegar fumes rising sharp enough to cut through the boiler‑steam and fabric softener clinging to the room. As people pass cartons hand to hand, fingers brush, sleeves snag, and the usual pecking order of who serves whom gets scrambled; for a moment the family choreography missteps, everyone slightly out of sync. An aunt who would ordinarily never reach across Granddad does exactly that; a cousin hands a portion to a younger sibling before offering it to an older one; someone forgets to defer the brown sauce to Dominic’s dad first. There are small apologies, half‑laughs, the clink of forks on plates as territories are re‑drawn.
Dominic feels the disruption like a draught under a door. Normally he could have predicted the pattern blindfolded: plates starting at his mum’s end, his dad taking too much gravy, Will talking while serving himself first, Marnie performing generosity with a flourish of “You go, love.” Tonight the lines blur. Sebastian, out of place in knitwear that has never known chip fat, leans in to take a carton and nearly knocks a bottle of ketchup over. Marnie, instead of smoothing it, is busy one‑handed with her phone, offering distracted “Ta, cheers” noises without looking up. Even Lena, careful Lena, ends up with a ladle of mushy peas she didn’t ask for, smiling as though this were exactly what she’d wanted.
For a few hectic moments there is no clear host, no obvious centre: only hands, paper, steam and salt. Voices overlap (“Pass us that one) ” “No, the chicken pie (” “Who’s had the last of the scraps then?”) and the hierarchy softens into a muddle of bodies pressed too close in a room half a size too small for the number of expectations in it. By the time everyone has a plate, the food has cooled a shade and something else, less easily named, has shifted with it.
Dominic ends up wedged between Will and Lena, half‑perched on the edge of a folding chair that complains every time someone leans on the table, its metal joints ticking like it’s counting down to failure. His knees are jammed against the underside; every shift risks knocking a gravy boat into someone’s lap. From here he has the whole thing laid out before him like evidence: pie crusts caving in along their seams, chips losing their edge to the air, ketchup bottles sweating red down their necks, grease marks blooming on the paper. Faces ring the table, turned inward, lit by the yellow glare of the pendant light and the television’s flicker from the front room. People are smiling, talking, licking salt from their fingers, but the glances that skim over him feel measuring rather than fond.
It has the air of a tribunal disguised as tea, everyone too busy with their forks to start on him properly. The questions are there already, though, crouching behind the steam, waiting their turn.
Will spots, with a mechanic’s instinct for gaps, that the table has fallen briefly quiet except for the rasp of salt shakers and the rip of vinegar sachets. He clears his throat lightly and, before Dominic’s dad can reload his conversational gun, launches into a tale about a “massive order” he’s just landed. It comes dressed as banter, “absolute nightmare sorting the courier, you wouldn’t believe it”, but the figures he drops are sharp and gleaming, polished for impact. His smartwatch vibrates madly against his wrist, unnoticed or theatrically ignored.
Heads tilt his way. A couple of aunts exchange looks of pleased surprise; an uncle mutters, “Good lad.” The orbit of the table shifts, pulling away from Dominic’s hunched silence and settling, for now, around Will’s bright, hustling competence.
Sebastian, hemmed in by the narrow room, shifts his chair with practiced care so he isn’t clipped by every passing plate, then offers to top up drinks from the two‑litre bottles clustered by his feet. “Coke? Lemonade? Half and half?” His hands are steady, voice smooth, taking orders with a faintly amused precision. The small act of service, performed without fuss, labels turned outward, no spill daring to blot the plastic cloth, marks him out as oddly at home in the cramped chaos, an outsider who nonetheless knows exactly how to audition as “one of them.”
As the last plate is finally wedged onto the crowded cloth and someone remembers to thumb the TV volume down a notch, the chatter thins into that brief, weighty lull before a new subject is chosen. Dominic can feel it hunting for a target. His dad clears his throat, glances round the table as if checking no one can escape, and offers up a seemingly harmless remark about “how dear everything is these days”. A stock phrase with teeth in it. Everyone hums agreement, non‑committal, but Dominic hears the track it’s already laid, the way it can trundle off safely into petrol prices and the price of cod, or, with the smallest nudge, switch across onto mortgages, bad decisions, and which of the younger lot are “throwing good money away” renting in cities.
His dad takes the opening he’s been stalking all afternoon, like a dog that’s finally seen a gap in the traffic. “Rent’s dead money, in’t it?” he announces, carving the point into his pie with unnecessary force. “No sense you lot chuckin’ it at landlords in them cities, not when there’s houses going here. Specially if someone’s thinkin’ of comin’ back for good.”
The “someone” is not in doubt. He tips his fork in Dominic’s direction in what might, in a more generous household, pass for a joke. The eyes give it away: no twinkle, just a measuring tightness that has weighed up Dominic since he walked through the door.
Sound in the room changes. The TV continues to burble football commentary from the front room, but it’s as if it’s been put under a cushion. The scrape of knives on china goes muffled, the oil‑scented air thickening around the words “for good” like steam on a window.
Dominic feels his shoulders creep up towards his ears before he’s even fully parsed the sentence. The back of his neck prickles; his jacket suddenly seems two sizes too small. He nudges a chip through a glossy tide of gravy, watching it disintegrate at the edges. His dad’s nod sits on him like a hand on the back of his head, pressing.
“We’ll… see how things go,” he gets out at last, the words flattened into something that could be agreement or evasion. He keeps his eyes on his plate. If he looks up, there’ll be faces, hopeful, sceptical, amused, and he cannot quite bear to see which is which.
The table holds its collective breath, as if waiting to hear whether this counts as backchat. An aunt’s fork hovers mid‑air. Someone’s phone buzzes against the vinyl cloth and is instantly silenced. Even the vinegar bottles seem to pause in their sticky stand.
Marnie moves first. She leans back so her chair creaks dangerously and lets out a theatrical groan. “Oh, don’t start on houses. I nearly killed a succulent last week,” she declares, flinging one hand toward the ceiling in mock despair. “Imagine me with actual bricks. Everyone’d be evacuated within a month. ‘Gas leak? No, that’s just Marnie trying to use the boiler.’”
A ripple of laughter runs round, grateful, seizing the offered escape route. One of the younger cousins, mouth full of fish, pipes up that she’d be worse, she once let basil go mouldy. Another claims with pride that he killed a cactus. Within moments they are competitively recounting the most shameful plant deaths and theoretical DIY disasters, awarding themselves imaginary points.
The spell thins, but Dominic can still feel its thread looped round his wrist. Beneath Marnie’s patter, the earlier sentence sits in the centre of the table like an extra plate no one quite knows who’s supposed to clear.
Will, who has been following the plant‑murder anecdotes with the distracted smile of someone watching his last lifeboat drift away, straightens so fast his chair gives a small squeak. He wipes his fingers on a paper napkin that’s already translucent with grease, folds it as if that were part of the pitch, and dives into the gap Marnie has opened.
“Actually,” he says, a fraction too loud, a shade too bright, “talkin’ about stayin’ put. Been workin’ on something new, me. You know my valeting lot? Lads on Facebook, the wee videos?” He scans the table for nods that prove he is, indeed, a going concern. “I’m lookin’ at takin’ a unit down by the old bus depot. Proper setup. Garage, detailin’, the works. None of this workin’ out me mam’s drive forever.”
He cuts a quick glance at Dominic. “Be perfect for someone who actually knows engines, like. Not just how to post shiny pictures.”
He sprinkles it in as garnish, aiming for careless: “Been chattin’ with a couple of investors about it, an’ all. People who know a good opportunity when they see it.”
That word, investors, lands on the tablecloth with far more weight than his napkin. A few heads swivel his way as if on the same hinge. From where Dominic sits, the gloss doesn’t quite cover the edges: the minute stutter in Will’s thumb on his fork, the jittering knee thumping the underside of the table, the way his eyes keep checking the older faces for approval as though he were twelve and begging for a lift to town.
The aunties, though, hear only hustle and horizons. An uncle nods, impressed in principle if not in detail. Visibly, they re‑arrange their mental furniture: Will, with his buzzing phone and big talk, is suddenly set side by side with Sebastian’s cashmere and Ryan’s neat blazer, three different brands of future laid out for inspection. Dominic feels, absurdly, as if he has been pushed onto the same shelf and priced.
Sebastian, catching the shift, lowers his lashes to his pint and adds his thread with practised lightness, as if merely joining in rather than redirecting the whole loom. “The old depot’s not a bad spot,” he observes, in the tone of a man who has been privately mapping the town in his head and finding it quaint. “I know a chap up on the headland estate who’s involved with some commercial units round here. He could probably point you toward the right people.”
He does not so much as offer to make the call; he only lets the prospect drift above the table, a balloon labelled Access, available to those sufficiently worthy. At the phrase “headland estate” two aunties lean forward, faces smoothing as if ironed. An uncle’s jaw, by contrast, hardens a fraction, the old suspicion of Langleys and their land resurfacing like something left under the sand.
Dominic, hearing his hometown compressed into “units” and “the estate” in that careful southern accent, feels heat prickle up under his collar. It sounds like someone reaching into his scuffed streets with clean hands and long fingers, arranging them for their own convenience, and still somehow expecting thanks.
A thin lull follows Sebastian’s little drop of estate magic, and into it a sharp electronic buzz slices through the clink of cutlery. Marnie twitches, fishes her phone from where it’s half‑tucked under her thigh. For an instant the screen flares white against her palm, subject line in a brisk, impersonal font: Final Offer – Response Required. Her fork stalls mid‑air, gravy dripping back in slow strings. The colour leaves her face so quickly Dominic wonders if the bulb’s gone, then returns in a rush as she flips the phone face down and barks a laugh. “Bloody work, honestly. They’d have us on emails in the grave.” The older relatives tut in knowing solidarity and turn back to Will’s investors; no one at the far end seems to have clocked the words. Lena, though lifts a hand to adjust her glasses with exaggerated care, eyes politely away. She files the phrase in whatever quiet drawer she keeps for field notes and family fault‑lines. To Dominic, who’s only seen the change in Marnie’s jaw, it feels as if another door in the room has silently swung half‑open: proof that one of the golden ones is already halfway gone, even while everyone performs reunion like a Christmas special.
Ryan has been listening, head tilted, letting the rise and fall of voices wash over him like tide on shingle. Between bites of pie he eases into the gap Marnie’s joke has left. “There’s definitely scope here,” he says, as if merely musing. “I’ve been advising a few people round here on setting up properly: sole traders, limited companies, that sort of thing. Seabridge is ripe for the right kind of investment, if it’s handled well.”
“Ripe” drops into the steam and chatter with a faint, unsettling sweetness. A couple of relatives straighten, as if the town they’ve always known has been quietly reclassified as a market, their lives reduced to footfall and yield. Dominic feels the air thicken, as if someone has shut a window. His dad’s nod about houses, Will’s bright talk of investors, Sebastian’s estate “chap”, Ryan’s unruffled chat about structures and opportunities. They stack, brick on brick, around him.
For a flicker of a moment he sees through the gap: a unit with his name on the paperwork, grease under his nails in his own place, not some boss’s; a front door he doesn’t have to hand back at the end of a tenancy; his tools lined up where he left them. The picture is so sharp it almost hurts. He stuffs it down at once, reaching for the safety of mockery.
“Sounds like too much paperwork and posh estate types for me,” he mutters, nudging peas into a green wall. The line wins him a polite little ripple of laughter, enough cover for retreat. But under the shrug something old and hungry has turned over, blinked against the light, and found the room already arguing about who owns the view.
The auntie, half a glass of wine past tactful and flushed high on the cheeks, fans herself with a paper serviette that’s begun to go limp at the edges. She leans right across Dominic’s mum, bosom pressing into the cruet set, and pitches her voice to cut clean through cutlery and chair‑scrapes. “Listen to you lot,” she announces, with the satisfaction of someone unveiling a conclusion, “investors this, business structures that. Give it a year and you’ll have Seabridge on the telly, won’t you? Flipping houses and doing up them posh garages down the front. Makeover Week in bloody Langley Street.”
Forks pause mid‑air; gravy drips back in slow streaks. A cousin at the far end snorts so hard it sends a spray of peas skittering. Someone else mutters, “I wouldn’t say no if they did my roof while they were at it,” to a ripple of amusement. The idea of the town rendered as montage, time‑lapse scaffolding, mournful shots of “before” Seabridge and triumphant drone sweeps of “after”, lands in the steam between them, ridiculous and faintly plausible all at once.
Dominic catches the tail end of it, “on the telly” and “posh garages”, and his stomach gives an odd little twist. He pictures strangers in hi‑vis and headsets tramping up and down the promenade he used to bomb along on his BMX, measuring it in square footage instead of scraped knees and first kisses behind the arcade. The words “investors” and “ripe” from a moment ago coil back in, now dressed up with theme music and before‑and‑after shots.
He shoves another forkful of pie into his mouth, jaw working, and pretends he’s only listening for the jokes. But what he hears, faintly, under the laughter, is the sound of other people planning what to do with his town as if he’s not there; as if the place is already a set and he’s wandered in as an extra, late and in the wrong clothes.
She jabs the wilting serviette in Sebastian’s direction as if she’s appointing him project manager of Seabridge, mistaking his composed, faintly amused smile for a solemn pledge. “Him an’ all,” she crows, delighted with her own detective work. “Bet he’s already bought half the town in his head, haven’t you, love?”
Sebastian’s brows tick up a fraction, but she barrels on, rolling his earlier throwaway lines into a full‑blown narrative. “Headland estate this, commercial units that, ooh, you’ll have our Will in one of them shiny branded overalls, won’t you? All logo‑fied.” She mimes a rectangle across Will’s chest, squinting as if reading invisible embroidery. “An’ Dom”, the serviette swings, scattering a fleck of gravy onto the tablecloth, “Dom can be your grease monkey on camera. Little spanner in his hand, bit o’ muck on his face for the ladies at home.”
The table ripples with laughter, some of it sharp with genuine amusement, some with the thin, high note of people laughing at the shape of a future they haven’t agreed to, but which everyone suddenly seems to see.
Sebastian merely lifts his glass, the set of his mouth the diplomatic cousin of a smile. “Hardly,” he says. In a quieter room it would land as the gentle demurral he intends. Here it’s swallowed at once by the swell of voices and the auntie’s satisfied cackle. To her (and to the few relatives already nodding as if minutes have been taken) his idle mention of “a chap on the estate” has congealed into a fully costed scheme: posh capital, local graft, cameras rolling by Easter.
Will is quickest to see the advantage in her mistake. He leans into it, grin widening. “Hey, don’t give Netflix ideas,” he says, but his eyes gleam, already stashing the misconception away as leverage for later.
He comes in on the crest of the noise: “…Sebastian’ll sort the units, Ryan’ll do the paperwork, and our Will and Dom’ll make a killing, you watch.” His own name, dangled on the end like a mascot or a lucky charm rather than anyone you’d ask, lands harder than the punchline. Heat pricks his neck; his shoulders knot. He saws at the congealing gravy instead of looking up, jaw tight, as if the plate’s the only thing here that’s his to manage.
What curdles in his gut isn’t just a daft auntie’s telly patter but the sense of a panel convened in his mum’s dining room, divvying up “future opportunities” and square footage and camera angles over his head (posh estate contacts, advisers, “investors”) while he shepherds peas round cold gravy. By the time the laughter thins, he’s already stepped back inside himself, convinced the real conversation about what happens to this town has slipped past him into some higher, carpeted room whose door he’ll never be invited through, and that whatever part he’s been allotted is merely decorative, grease‑stained, and entirely optional.
While the others are still chuckling and trading quips, Marnie keeps her gaze fixed on her plate, the skin at the back of her neck prickling as if someone’s opened a window. Her fork has stalled mid‑air, a chip cooling on the tines. Beneath the table, thumb and forefinger work with practised stealth: phone woken with a tap, mail app summoned, the glowing subject line re‑revealed like a trick card: Final Offer – Response Required.
She had half‑seen it a moment ago, the words skimming across her brain’s surface and sliding off, filed with discount codes and marketing decks and things For Later. Now, with her dad’s “coming back for good” tossed onto the table like a commandment rather than a suggestion, the same words burn; the phrase seems to throb in time with the clatter of cutlery. Final. Offer. Response. Required. No room there for “seeing how things go.” No polite Midlands hedging in that syntax at all.
Her father’s voice still hangs, faintly echoing under the current of new chatter. Coming back for good. As if “for good” were a fixed address you could simply choose from a drop‑down menu: Home, Abroad, Other. As if she hadn’t spent the last decade training herself to inhabit departure lounges better than living rooms.
She scrolls, just enough to see the first line of the message. Package details, relocation support, start dates. Two neat paragraphs that assume only one rational answer. An unruffled HR voice in her head offers bullet‑pointed stability, international exposure, a salary that would make the mortgage talk around this table look like toy money.
Across from her, a cousin laughs too loudly at something Will has said about “branding the depot properly.” Beside her glass, a smear of gravy congeals, stubbornly failing to look like a settled life. Marnie shifts her phone, angling the screen further into her lap, away from the casual, acquisitive glances of family eyes that have never quite accepted that not every notification is community property.
It isn’t just the job on the other side of the world that’s glowing at her; it’s the collision of timelines. In her inbox: six months’ notice, shipping allowances, serviced apartments. In her ears: talk of fixed‑rate deals, school catchment areas, being “sensible” before they’re “too old for this renting malarkey.” Two futures jostling for elbow‑room on the same overcrowded table, both imagining her as the final piece of their particular puzzle, neither asking whether she wants to be a piece at all.
She taps the little star icon almost absently, as if she were merely flagging a memo about printer toner rather than detonating a private charge under the table. The tiny gold badge appears beside the subject line, dainty as a brooch and twice as incriminating. There: a discreet, digital pin in a map whose geography belongs only to her.
Around her, the choreography continues. An arm reaches across her shoulder for the ketchup, sleeve brushing her hair; someone further down calls, “Oi, leave some for us that aren’t on posh jobs abroad yet,” and laughter ripples obligingly. A cousin chimes in about “expat packages” with the authority of someone who’s read exactly one lifestyle article. Chairs scrape, plates clink, Will starts up again about “global markets” as if he’s personally in talks with Brussels.
Marnie smiles in roughly the right places and lets the noise roll over her, tinny and distant, as if heard through bad headphones. In the small universe cupped between her knees, the starred email glows steadily, patient and implacable: a polite little ticking clock no one else can hear.
Her fingers hover, then, with the practised discretion of someone answering client emails in meetings, she ghosts open a new reply window beneath the table, screen dimmed to a conspirator’s glow. One‑handed, thumb tapping out the most neutral treachery she can compose: “Hi: thanks so much for this. Is there any flexibility on the response deadline?” She pauses after the question mark, watching the sentence sit there, prim and reasonable, as if it belonged to a person who knew exactly what she wanted.
Around her, someone rattles on about Help to Buy and square footage; in her lap, the draft feels like a side‑door. With each word, she is quietly edging out of the crowded kitchen and into a carpeted, echoing corridor where only she and the future exist, everyone else reduced to muffled sound behind a closed fire door.
Halfway through rereading it, the old instinctive prickle of being observed creeps up her spine; without daring to raise her head, she scrubs the sentence out, thumb holding down backspace until the words vanish, as if disloyalty could be undone by deletion. She locks the screen, sets the phone face‑down by her plate, and joins in a cousin’s anecdote a heartbeat too late, laugh slightly overbright, warmth in her cheeks betraying nothing and everything at once.
She feels the ghost of the erased sentence like a pulse under her ribs: a silent metronome ticking to a rhythm no one else is dancing to. The talk of deposits and bus depots becomes background static as she sketches, behind her smile, two calendars: one inked with Sunday teas and school runs, the other with flights, packing lists, out‑of‑office replies. In one, Seabridge is the point; in the other, it’s a footnote she files under “fieldwork” and doesn’t quite trust herself to open.
Sebastian clocks the appreciative murmur from Dominic’s aunt and, with the smallest adjustment of shoulders, lets himself sink a fraction further back in his chair, as if someone has just formally invited him to take the floor. His thumb idly traces the stem of his glass; he looks, Dominic thinks sourly, like he’s at some charity dinner at the Hall rather than wedged at a laminate table with a bottle of brown sauce for a centrepiece.
“Well,” Sebastian says, allowing the single syllable to expand, soft and urbane, into the brief hush that’s fallen. He glances along the table. Not at Dominic, of course, but just past him, as though the entire family were an attentive audience and he was merely being reluctantly drawn into their concerns. “If people are genuinely thinking about projects here,” he continues, making “projects” sound like tasteful barn conversions rather than Will’s knackered Transit, “I daresay there are a few people I could introduce you to. People who know the lie of the land, as it were.”
The phrase is delivered with a faint self‑aware smile, like an in‑joke for those who know there’s an actual estate on the headland whose “land” is being lied about. Dominic feels his jaw tighten. He has known this land since before he could ride a bike without his dad’s hand on the saddle; he could drive the old bus depot blindfold, never mind “know” it. But Sebastian’s “people” land in the room with the soft thud of cheques on polished wood.
He keeps it pleasantly foggy an indistinct mist of “chaps” and “contacts” conjured without ever quite solidifying. It is an artful kind of generosity: all doors implied, none actually opened. Around the table, shoulders ease, eyes sharpen. Some of the older relatives lean in, their expressions rearranging from wary amusement to a speculative warmth that Dominic recognises and mistrusts; it is the look they used to reserve for visiting managers from the factory, the ones who might, if flattered correctly, save a job or two. Sebastian, sensing the shift, merely sips his drink and lets the future rearrange itself around him.
Will’s head snaps round at “introduce” as if someone’s just said “seed capital.” The word hits some reflex in him; he is already half‑turned before he seems to know he’s moving. He nods so hard his chair gives a protesting creak, hand flying up to smooth his shirt front, shoulders squaring as though he’s about to launch into a pitch deck instead of sitting at his aunt’s laminate table with gravy congealing on his plate.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what we’ve been saying, isn’t it?” he cuts in, a fraction too quickly. The grin he produces is broad enough to show molars, more wattage than the energy‑saving bulb above them. “Local knowledge plus the right connections, that’s how you scale something proper.” The way he says “scale” makes Dominic’s teeth itch.
Will angles his body so that Sebastian is firmly within his eyeline, trying to catch and hold his gaze. When he gets it, he lets the moment run a beat too long, chin lifted, expression intent: the hungry protégé in a glossy brochure, already imagining himself in a sharper suit, already mentally moving the bus depot onto a slideshow marked “Phase Two Expansion.”
Ryan, not to be out‑charmed, wipes his fingers fastidiously on his napkin and leans in with an easy, practised smile that manages to look both modest and faintly authoritative. “Connections are brilliant,” he says, tone mild enough to pass for casual, “but getting the structure right from the outset is what actually keeps it standing.” His forefinger taps twice on the laminate as if it were a balance sheet rather than a battlefield. “Different setups suit different kinds of risk. You want to ring‑fence liability, think about tax, succession… Saves a lot of grief down the line if you plan it properly instead of, you know” (he flicks Will a quick, almost apologetic smile) “chucking everything in a bucket and hoping.”
The older relatives half‑follow, half‑glaze over; “structures” and “risk profiles” drift above the gravy boat like subtitles in a language they were never offered at school. For the younger end, though, the subtext is louder than the jargon: Sebastian with his estate “people,” Ryan with his calm frameworks, Will with his restless buzzwords. Each inches his chair into the conversational centre, stacking “introductions,” “investors,” “protecting yourself” into a single, glittering assertion that, in this cramped room, really means: I’m the one who understands how the world works now, and the rest of you are still playing catch‑up.
Dominic chews mechanically, pie turning to paste as the air tilts; Seabridge, which had been sea wall and chip fat an hour ago, is quietly redrawn in other people’s mouths as an “opportunity zone” and “market.” Marnie lifts her glass and laughs at something trivial, but her eyes skim between Sebastian and Ryan like she’s watching a slow‑motion rally; Lena, half‑turned toward the kitchen, absorbs the posturing with a small, knowing curve of her mouth, already, Dominic suspects, filing it under Fieldwork. By the time his dad lifts his head to ask, “Eh? What’s that you do, then, lad?” the new hierarchy of who counts as “useful” has already begun to set like cooling fat. Primed for the neat little misunderstanding that follows.
Dominic’s dad squints down the table, half an ear on Ryan and the other firmly tuned to his own conclusions. “Business structures, is it?” he repeats, as though testing an unfamiliar spanner. The term comes out flattened, the s disappearing somewhere around his back teeth. “Buildin’ structures, you mean?”
Ryan inhales, mouth already shaping the first lawyerly clarification, but he’s a good two seconds slower than the pint and the pride working in Mr Harlow’s bloodstream. Dad slaps the table with the heel of his hand, plates jolting, gravy shivering. “Oh, so you’re a builder an’ all, are you? Ideal, that.” His chest swells, pleased as if he’s just caught a full house on the scratchcards. “We’ve got the full set now, ” he ticks them off on his thick fingers, grease at the knuckle creases, “mechanic, money man, builder, and…”
His hand flaps in Sebastian’s direction, hovering somewhere between the cashmere and the watch. “…whatever it is you are.”
Sebastian’s brows lift by a single, aristocratically measured millimetre. Around him, the table ripples with laughter. Some warm, some edged like broken shell. One aunt gives a snort that says she’s been waiting all evening for somebody to prick the cashmere. Will laughs a fraction too loudly, seizing on “money man” like a badge properly earned. Ryan’s smile pauses, then resets itself into something practised, agreeable, a man who is jolly well happy to be mistaken for a bricklayer if it keeps the mood light.
Dominic stares at his plate, jaw working. “Mechanic” lands on his shoulders with the weight of a job title pinned there since he was fifteen and good with a socket wrench. He hears “full set” and imagines his dad laying them all out like tools in a roll. Useful if they fit the right gaps in Seabridge, put back in the box if they don’t. Above the clatter of cutlery and the gusts of amusement, the tiny, stupid error (business into building) slides neatly into place, the sort of misunderstanding that would be funny if it weren’t about to be used as scaffolding for an entire conversation he wants no part of.
“Mum, he doesn’t actually, ” Dominic starts, but his protest tangles with Marnie’s, Lena’s, Sebastian’s, everyone politely rescuing the wrong point.
“He’s not a builder, Dad,” Marnie chimes in, laughter bright enough to be a diversion flare. “He’s a solicitor. Like. Paper cuts instead of splinters.”
At the same time Lena says, in her seminar voice, “Business structures is more like company paperwork. How you set a business up, not the actual bricks,” and Sebastian adds, with that faintly amused tilt to his mouth that suggests he’s only half‑involved, “Foundations of a different sort, Mr Harlow. Legal ones.”
Dominic’s mum, catching about one word in three over the clatter of plates, repeats, “Aye, well, someone’s got to keep the roof up,” with a satisfied nod toward Ryan, which only muddles the categories further. One uncle mutters, “Always comes down to the roof,” as if that settles the matter.
Ryan lifts his hands in mild, diplomatic surrender, palms open. “I just help people set things up properly, really. Mostly forms and boring stuff: making sure folk don’t get stung,” he offers, but his voice is thinned to nothing under the overlapping corrections and jokes, his neat little self‑definition sluiced away in the gravyish noise.
Will clocks the opening like a gap in traffic on the ring road and swerves hard. “Exactly, foundations,” he crows, seizing the word as his. He plants his elbows either side of his plate, leaning in so the overhead light catches the gel in his hair. “So picture this, yeah? Down by the old bus depot: three units. One proper service bay, ramps, diagnostics, the lot. One just for valeting and high‑end detailing, ceramic coats, packages, subscriptions, then a reception-slash-office front, coffee machine, decent chairs, looks professional.”
He jerks his chin at Dominic. “Dom runs the bays, obviously. I’m on bookings and online. Ryan sorts all the legal side, makes sure the lease is sound. Seb’ll have a word with his estate lot about the units.” He rides straight over, “He’s not a builder, Will,” like it’s only background noise, already high on the fizz of his own pitch.
“Hang on, I. “See, we knock through this bit” (a swipe of his finger sends a chip skidding into Dominic’s beans) “so the cars can come straight through from the road, dead efficient. Maybe a mezzanine office if planning’ll allow; Ryan’ll know about that, won’t you, mate? Do your… structures.” Sebastian smiles thinly, raising his glass like a man toasting a mildly absurd proposal. “I can certainly ask around about the depot ownership,” he says, carefully non‑committal, but Dominic’s dad hears only the confidence and nods, impressed, already filing Sebastian under “useful” rather than merely decorative.
Around them, the story hardens into fact, mortar setting round air. Dominic’s mum, already halfway to proud, says, “Well, that sounds like a proper set‑up, our Will. You’d be daft not to, Dom.” An uncle pronounces, “Good to have legal in the family, saves a fortune,” and a younger cousin pipes, “Can I work on reception, wear a headset?” Dominic, jaw tight, clocks the way Sebastian and Ryan are drafted into service like press‑ganged sailors, their faintly frozen smiles read as hearty consent. Every nod is taken as a signature. Laughter bubbles at another of Dad’s “full set” jokes, but beneath it the whole scheme is mishearing and wishful thinking, a wobbly structure everyone’s already leaning their weight against.
The galley kitchen is thick with steam and clatter, someone’s laughter leaking in from the front room; Dominic wedges himself sideways between the counter and Lena’s hip to reach for the cupboard. The lino sticks faintly under his boots, and the window is fogged to a blank grey where the sea should be. A stack of plates wobbles in the drying rack every time someone stomps through the hall, adding a nervous percussion to the hiss of the kettle.
“Hang on: sorry,” she says, fingers brushing his as she goes for the mugs; they both pull back at once, a clumsy little dance that makes him suddenly aware of how close they are. Her cardigan sleeve grazes his arm, soft and bobbled; there’s the faint smell of cold outside air and ink and whatever shampoo academics use when they’re not being paid enough.
He mutters, “You’re all right,” a fraction too gruff, and reaches again, this time over her shoulder. The cupboard door sticks, like everything else in the house that never quite gets fixed because “it’s still working, in’t it,” and he has to give it a sharp shove. Mugs clink together with the dull familiarity of a hundred brews made in arguments and truces and in‑betweens.
From the front room, his mum’s voice carries over the TV: “…bound to move back now he’s got Will and maybe Ryan to sort him out…” The words snag in Dominic’s chest like a hook. Sort him out. Like he’s a leaking pipe or a bad habit.
Lena glances toward the doorway, then back at him, something sympathetic and wry flickering over her face. He can’t quite look directly at it. He focuses instead on counting mugs and lines them up with more force than necessary, porcelain tapping out his irritation on the counter.
“Hang on: sorry,” she says, fingers brushing his as she goes for the mugs; they both pull back at once, a clumsy little dance that makes him suddenly, stupidly aware of how close they are in the narrow strip of lino. Her hand is smaller than he remembers, ink‑stained at the edge of her thumb; his own looks blunt and oil‑scarred next to it, the kind of hand people imagine when they say things like proper work and mean not what she does.
He steps back half an inch, shoulder bumping the cupboard door, and the movement sends a faint shiver through the stacked plates. Lena shifts too, cardigan sleeve grazing his forearm, soft and old and smelling faintly of books and cold air. For a second they both half‑laugh under their breath, not quite making eye contact, as if acknowledging that the house has shrunk since they were kids, or they’ve grown too large for it.
The kettle hums, filling the silence with an expectant, rising buzz that seems to demand someone say something real.
Lena clears her throat, eyes flicking to the doorway where Will’s laugh rises above the TV and the clink of cutlery. She watches the blur of bodies passing and, in a tone that aims for throwaway but lands a shade too careful, says, “So… this whole garage thing. Is that actually something you want, or is it just another round of them organising your life for you?”
She’s angled the pronoun to mean them, not you; it’s meant to be a private little alliance, a joke shared over the heads of the rest. Her eyebrows lift, inviting him to roll his eyes with her. Instead, the words hit a raw place he’s already flinching from.
The words stack on his mum’s “sort him out” like bricks on his chest; something hot and sour spikes behind his eyes. He doesn’t so much decide to speak as feel the retort tear loose. “Must be nice,” he hears himself say, harsher than intended, “folk with proper careers having opinions on what counts as real work, isn’t it?”
Her face flickers open in surprise, hand still hovering uselessly over the sink as if she’s waiting for instructions that never come. She’d thought she was stepping neatly onto his side of the line, away from the chorus in the other room; instead the bite in his voice catches her mid‑stride, and she stops there, suspended. The kettle’s rising whistle muscles into the silence, shrill and officious, blotting out the half‑formed explanation on her tongue until it curdles into nothing.
Lena swallows, shoulders tightening as if she’s bracing for a wave, then lets out a small, humourless puff of air that fogs the window for half a second before the draft whisks it away. “Believe me, nobody here thinks what I do counts as real anything,” she says. The words are angled to skim the surface, a skit at her own expense, but they come out thinner than she intends, stretched over something more fragile. Her voice hooks slightly on real, as though she’s quoting someone who said it first and better.
She drops her gaze, the back of her neck prickling with the old, familiar awareness of being the one with the strange job, the one who went away to sit in libraries instead of doing something you could describe in one sentence over Sunday dinner. She aims for light but lands closer to brittle, because she can hear, patiently catalogued, every past remark, Oh, still at college then, love? and When are you getting a proper post? and That’s nice, but what do you actually do?. Layering themselves behind his accusation.
The tea towel in her hands, once a faded tartan, twists incrementally tighter. Knuckles blanch against the wet cotton as she turns back to the greasy roasting tin in the sink, surrendering to the safe choreography of hot water and suds. Grease blooms into cloudy swirls; her fingers find the baked-on corners with unnecessary force, as if the tin has personally questioned her life choices. The tap hisses, the cheap washing-up liquid squeaks under her grip, and every sound in the small galley feels suddenly far too loud.
She keeps her eyes on the metal, on the stubborn strip of fat clinging to the rim, because looking up would mean seeing his expression and discovering exactly how far below “real anything” she has just fallen in his estimation.
Dominic hears only the word “real” as if she’s jabbed it with her finger. It seems to ring off the tiles, echoing every careers‑advisor leaflet and job-centre poster he’s ever pretended not to read. His jaw works, a slow grind he can feel all the way up behind his eyes. “Yeah, well, must be nice having options,” he mutters, the phrase coming out flat and sour, more accusation than observation.
He reaches for the nearest stack of plates, sets them down on the draining board with a little too much conviction, the china giving a protesting clink that makes him wince and pretend he hasn’t. Another plate, another sharp contact; a neat, breakable tower between them. His gaze clamps onto the sink, onto the crusted edge of a baking tray, anywhere but the smeared rectangle of the dark window where her face hovers, doubled beside his. The reflection is there, ghost‑pale against the black glass, and he refuses to look directly at it, in case he finds confirmation that she’s cataloguing him along with everything else.
To Lena, the line lands with the clean, cold edge of a file note mislabelled on purpose: like he’s saying she’s parachuted back in with her notebooks to observe the natives, jotting down their quaint rituals before retreating to somewhere with better coffee. Her mouth compresses; she sees, with sudden embarrassment, the open laptop upstairs, the draft article about “returning professionals” blinking patiently on the screen, every phrase about navigation and classed belonging now sounding, in her own memory, smug. For one absurd second she feels as if he’s rifled through all her folders, read every footnote and margin comment that turns people she loves into data. “Right. Okay,” she says, voice narrowed, rinsing a glass that is already spotless, polishing an invisible smear.
The silence that follows seems to swell, dense as steam. In it Dominic quietly files her with everyone who thinks they’re too good for Seabridge, watching the way she won’t quite look at him now and taking it as proof. Lena, jaw tight, decides his earlier snap was the unvarnished verdict: her work’s a performance, and always has been.
A cousin’s head pokes round the doorframe, oblivious. “You two lovebirds done in here or what?” they jeer, eyebrows doing most of the work. Heat rakes up Dominic’s neck; he barks, “Nearly,” without turning, suds squeaking under his grip on the plate. Lena forces a thin, social smile, flicks off the tap with more force than needed. Following the cousin back toward the front‑room din, both walk in step yet separately, each already settled into a private, grimly tidy story in which the other has, with academic coolness or working‑man contempt, quietly written them off.
Back at the table, Will has claimed the corner nearest Sebastian as if proximity alone conferred partnership. His chair is angled in, elbow hooked over the back, phone facedown for once but still within stroking distance. The tendon in his jaw ticks each time a notification buzzes silently against the wood. “So if we get the units,” he says, pitching his voice into what he imagines is a confidential register, “you can sound out a couple of your people? See who wants in early?”
He says “units” as though they are already half‑bought. Concrete and shutters and high‑end valeting bays instead of the weed‑strewn lot by the bypass he’d dragged Dominic to see that afternoon. In his head it’s all gloss now: the cracked tarmac resurfaced into a clean, grey expanse; a row of gleaming cars waiting for detailing; a reception area with hanging plants and an espresso machine that hisses reassuringly every time he walks in. He’s already decided on a colour palette for the logo (navy and chrome, respectable but modern), can almost see it printed on invoices, stitched onto polo shirts, pinned to the top of an Instagram feed where customers tag their cars in golden hour light.
Sebastian, half‑turned away, is examining a sun‑faded school photo on the wall with anthropological interest, as though the Harlows at age eleven are a tribe discovered in the wild. He hears “units” and “your people” and files the whole thing neatly beside “artisan gin start‑up in Yorkshire” and “friend’s nephew’s tech app”. The vast hinterland of small enthusiasms that never trouble his accountant. Will’s knee bumps the table; cutlery rattles. “Be ground floor,” he adds, eager. “There’s a gap up here for something properly done. Not just back‑street cowboys.”
He leans in, the smell of his aftershave cutting through the gravy and steam. “I mean, with your network, we could go higher‑end straight off. Not just locals. Second‑home crowd, people coming up from the city, that sort.” Already, in the cinema of his mind, he’s shaking hands with a man in a quilted gilet beside a Tesla, Sebastian laughing in the background, the deal as good as signed.
Sebastian allows his gaze to linger on a particularly lurid class photograph (too many gelled fringes, one boy in an oversized blazer clearly inherited from an uncle) while Will talks himself giddy. He catches “units,” “your people,” “gap in the market,” the usual Esperanto of small men with big plans, and arranges it all on the same mental shelf as the chap in Gloucestershire with the bespoke jam subscription company.
“I can always mention it in the right circles, of course,” he says at last, the words rolling out on an amiable drawl. It is the sort of line he has deployed a hundred times at charity dinners, when accosted between courses by someone brandishing a brochure and an over-sincere smile. A verbal nod, nothing more: no promise, no diary entry, no danger of his solicitor ever seeing a term sheet.
He turns back to the photograph as he speaks, signalling, without intending unkindness, that the matter is, in his world, already concluded. The phrase hangs between them, light as steam, meaning everything to one man and almost literally nothing to the other.
Will’s brain, primed for lifelines, latches onto “right circles” like a hook biting clean. Right circles means money, contacts, maybe even a discreet LLP with Sebastian’s surname somewhere reassuring on the headed paper. He pictures a London plate glinting outside the first Seabridge branch, some tasteful German saloon being handed back to its owner smelling of leather and success.
“Nice one,” he says, as if they have just shaken on it. His tongue runs ahead of him, already drafting phrases: early‑stage capital, strategic partnership, upscale market. Figures begin to arrange themselves in his mind: projected turnover, investor share, a number he could say without blushing.
By the time someone calls for more tea, Sebastian has been quietly upgraded, in Will’s private prospectus, from passing guest to future cornerstone investor.
Later, when an aunt squeezes past Will’s chair to collect empty plates and chirps, “How’s business then, love? All this wheeling and dealing?” he straightens, sensing his cue to be both modest and magnificent. “Good, yeah,” he says, flashing his automatic smile. “Seb’s keen on the numbers, just early days, like.” He hears himself as prudently cautious; she hears a man practically turning investors away at the door.
The aunt’s eyebrows leap: posh boyfriend, posh backing, box ticked. By the time she’s squeezed past the doorframe and into the steam and clatter of the galley kitchen, “Seb’s keen on the numbers” has become “Sebastian’s taken the finances in hand,” then, with an extra shake of the teapot, “Sebastian’s backing Will, love. Proper investor, London money and everything, not just family helping out.”
By the time the story bubbles up beside Dominic’s mum, it has grown arms, legs and a tasteful brochure. Sebastian is no longer merely “keen on the numbers” but “putting some money in for Will’s garages, you know. Proper investment, not just a few quid.” Somewhere between the dining table and the doorway, a casual remark has acquired capital letters and a business plan.
She catches hold of it the way she once caught Dominic by the collar in a busy road: fast, hard, not about to let go. “Proper investment”: she turns the words over like a new coin, tasting their shine. Not just family chipping in, not just a bit of cash in an envelope or your uncle doing the plastering for mates’ rates. Investment is what people on the breakfast news have; investment is what successful sons attract.
Her chest loosens in a way she hadn’t realised it was tight. Will, with his phone and his buzz and his talk of “scaling up,” has always sounded as though he belonged in someone else’s living room. If a man like Sebastian wants a piece of him, Sebastian with the quiet clothes and the watch that probably cost more than the Harlow car ever did, then perhaps Will isn’t simply juggling plates over the lino; perhaps he is, as the neighbour likes to say, “going places.”
And if Will is being invested in, then they, by some gentle trick of association, are the sort of family one invests in. Not just “our lot on Langley Street” with the damp round the window and the catalogue sofa; no, the Harlows with a footing in something bigger, something that can be mentioned without apology to the woman from number twelve whose son works “in finance” in Leeds.
She latches onto the rumour as if it were proof that they were never really small‑time to begin with. Only waiting, patiently, for the right kind of money to notice.
At the sink, sleeves rolled up and hands in suds, she repeats it to the neighbour drafted in to dry as if it were an item from the six‑o‑clock news. “Our Will’s got this Sebastian lad putting money in, proper posh investor. London type, him. Knows his way round figures, apparently.”
She tilts her chin towards the dining room, where the rumour was born, as though the proof were sitting there in cashmere. “Not just bunging him a bit, neither. Proper investment, contracts and that. He’s keen on the garages, sees potential. Said so himself.”
The pride in her voice carries easily over the running tap and clinking plates, over the hiss of the kettle and the distant burst of laughter from the front room. It threads itself through the steam and the smell of washing‑up liquid, brightening the dingy tiles. For a moment she is not simply up to her elbows in other people’s tea rings and gravy; she is the mother of a young man important enough to attract outside money. The word “investor” feels almost as good in her mouth as “son.”
The neighbour, who only vaguely knows which tall one Sebastian is but recognises the cut‑glass vowels and the cashmere, snorts in a way that manages to be both envious and impressed. “Well then,” she says, flicking a tea‑towel crumb into the sink, “if posh money’s coming in, town must be on the up, eh? About time you lot had someone with a bit of clout sniffing around. None of this scratting about with grant forms and start‑up schemes: proper backing.”
She leans closer, lowering her voice only enough to make it feel like gossip rather than proclamation. “That’s how it starts, you know. One of them notices us, next thing there’s articles in the paper, people queueing for your Will.”
Lena, squeezing past with a precarious stack of clean glasses, catches only that, “posh money” and “on the up”, rising above the steam like headlines. The fragments fall neatly into place beside the half‑serious grumbles she shared with Dominic’s dad earlier about second‑homers, boutique cafés and houses no one local can now afford, the town quietly re‑priced out from under its own feet.
By the time she reaches the doorway, she has quietly re‑catalogued the room. Sebastian slides into place as another soft‑voiced gentrifier, buying a little local colour along with influence; Will as the eager broker, happy to trade proximity for capital. And Dominic, leaning on the doorframe, shoulders tight, she instinctively shifts to the other column: the defended, not the benefiting, someone to be stood beside rather than studied.
In the narrow hallway, where coats and cousins and steam from the kitchen all bottleneck together, Marnie’s voice slices cleanly through the clatter of plates and the distant hiss of the kettle. “So this is someone nice you’ve finally brought home, then?”
She doesn’t bother to specify whom she’s addressing; her chin does the work, a little tilt toward Ryan, her eyebrows dancing in that way that pretends to be careless while taking in every flinch.
Dominic feels the words land before he’s properly registered them, like a tray edge catching his ribs. His ears go abruptly, treacherously hot. “Shut up, Marns,” he mutters, a beat too fast, too sharp for it to read as genuine banter. His gaze skids off hers, then off Ryan’s, catching instead on the wallpaper pattern he grew up with and has never quite forgiven.
He tries for a smirk to soften it and overshoots into something closer to a grimace. The narrowness of the hallway doesn’t help; there’s nowhere for him to retreat without making a scene, only an awkward shuffle that presses his back to the wall, as if the magnolia paint might conveniently open and let him through.
Ryan, shoulder bag tucked carefully out of the path of passing plates, feels the flush like a temperature change in the air between them. Dominic’s quick recoil, the colour across his cheekbones, the way his hand tightens on the empty mug he’s carrying. All of it tugs at professional habit as much as personal curiosity. He laughs along on cue, palms raised in mock surrender, but his attention’s already split, cataloguing.
Plenty of people dislike being teased about their love lives; that’s normal. But this looks less like mild embarrassment and more like someone being caught with a secret half‑written confession in their exercise book. The joke has skimmed over something rawer than Marnie realises.
Ryan files the reaction away, as automatically as he’d note a telling clause in a contract: the way Dominic’s eyes flick to him and away again, how he doesn’t quite step aside, how his throat works around words he doesn’t choose to say. Data, he thinks wryly, even as his own pulse picks up in an answering, entirely unprofessional flutter.
Ryan laughs along, palms raised in mock surrender, but the performance runs on a separate track to his attention. From the corner of his eye he takes in the stiff, uncompromising line of Dominic’s shoulders, the way his weight never quite commits to standing still, as if every muscle is hovering on the edge of a retreat back to the safer chaos of the kitchen.
The joke itself is nothing: standard family fare, the sort of needling that usually skims off people like rain off a waxed jacket. Yet Dominic doesn’t look gently mortified; he looks exposed, suddenly without his usual cover of sarcasm and folded arms. Heat has climbed high on his cheekbones and stayed there, stubborn, long after a more performative blush would have faded.
By the time an uncle shoulders through the bottleneck with a clattering tray of mugs and an oblivious, “Shift up, you lot,” Ryan has revised his first reading. Whatever is humming between them isn’t a one‑way current of his own making. It feels, instead, like something Dominic recognises and is resolutely declining to name while there are witnesses.
The aunt chats on about whose car is blocking whose drive and whether there’s enough trifle left to send next door, and Ryan nods in the right places, scarcely hearing her. In his mind the hallway keeps replaying: Marnie’s arch little smile, the deliberate sweep of her glance between them, Dominic’s startled colour. He’s seen enough families to know when a joke is a warning shot. This hadn’t been that. No tightening around her eyes, no swift follow‑up jibe to shove him back into the harmless box labelled “new bloke from away.”
If anything, she’d cracked the lid.
He feels a thread of relief wind through the low‑grade social tension of the evening. Whatever Dominic is or isn’t ready to admit, Ryan decides, he’s not walking entirely into enemy territory.
Balancing one lopsided stack of chairs against the wall, Ryan rolls the thought around his mouth in silence: Marnie knowing, not merely tolerating but lightly shepherding. In a clan this knitted‑together, true disapproval arrived swaddled in ten layers of mockery; instead, she had practically set the stage and pulled back the curtain. By the time he straightens and brushes dust from his palms, he has quietly promoted her hallway tease to tacit benediction. Evidence that at least one crucial gatekeeper is not only unalarmed, but gently giving things a shove.
Halfway down the hall, Sebastian catches only the tail of it, like the last bars of a tune heard through a wall: Marnie’s sing‑song “finally bringing someone nice home,” Dominic’s mortified, “Oh, shut up, Marns,” Ryan’s easy laugh smoothing the edges. He doesn’t need the preamble; tone is data. This is not how one welcomes a provisional guest. It is the indulgent teasing reserved for someone already half‑absorbed, a man described as if he belongs rather than auditions.
That settles Ryan, neatly and uncomfortably, on Sebastian’s inner map: no longer a vague professional acquaintance orbiting the family, but a nascent insider with emotional leverage. Worse, he is precisely the sort of steady, respectable figure Will might court for “proper advice” and introductions. Two fronts, then. Heart and money. Sebastian files the impression away with a coolness that feels almost like irritation, and begins, abstractly, to consider where a quiet word here or a well‑placed doubt there might loosen Ryan’s footing before it sets firm.
In the narrow strip of yard, the wind lifts washing and cigarette smoke together, tangling them into the same restless ribbon. A line of T‑shirts snaps and twists over their heads like small, irritable flags. Someone’s left the back door on the latch; it bangs faintly in the gusts, letting out snatches of laughter and the clink of cutlery as if the house itself were breathing too hard.
Lena leans her shoulder against the cold brick, feeling the damp come through her cardigan. The wall still has that faint, metallic chill of sea air baked in, the same texture she remembers from teenage summers when she’d perch here with a cheap cider and a book, pretending not to be listening to the arguments inside. Her thumb worries at an ink stain on her index finger, rubbing it as if the smudge might yield up a neat conclusion if she just insists.
She glances through the uncurtained back window where, a few minutes ago, she’d paused to put down her mug and accidentally caught sight of Marnie’s phone propped against a cereal box, email half‑open. Just enough of a subject line ( “CONFIRMATION OF OFFER – relocation package overseas” ) to lodge under her skin. Academic temptation had flared, quickly followed by a sting of something less professional: the thought of Marnie, of all people, flinging herself farther away than any of them had yet managed.
“So,” Lena says, aiming for a joke and hearing, too late, the brittle edge in it. “How far away you thinking of running this time, then?”
She keeps her tone light, almost sing‑song, as if they are still girls plotting their escapes on the school field. Her eyes flick toward the house, meaning the open inbox on the kitchen table, the gleam of a life measured in longitude and salary bands, the post overseas that has been needling at her since. But to anyone watching from the doorway, the glance would only seem to take in the whole little world behind them: brick and steam and family noise, the place people are always assumed to be running from.
Marnie straightens from where she’s nudging a plant pot back into line, fingers still pressed a little too hard into the cracked plastic rim. Her jaw tightens; the word has landed with a thud. “Running” is what aunties hiss about girls who go to uni and don’t come back, what her mum once muttered after a third consecutive Christmas in London. To her ear, it arrives pre‑loaded with accusation. That casual glance toward the house (toward the warm square of light where Sebastian’s coat hangs neatly on the peg) hooks itself, in an instant, onto his rented flat in Clapham, the family place in Surrey, the dinner parties where she stands introduced as “Marnie, she’s very creative.”
“It’s not running,” she snaps, colour rising in her cheeks before she can sand the edge off. “It’s just… options. And Sebastian’s life isn’t some villain origin story, you know. He’s not, ” she gives a little huff of incredulous laughter “, the Big Bad South.”
The line comes out half‑joke, half‑plea, as if Lena has already drafted the condemnatory footnote and Marnie is racing to annotate it first.
The words come out sharper than she intended, a little gust of temper shored up by the old, stubborn impulse to prove (to Lena, to any half‑listening aunt at the sink) that she hasn’t sold out or been bought. Heat prickles at the back of her neck. She folds her arms, angling her body as if bracing against a draft, and starts talking faster, crowding the silence before Lena can put any more labels on her choices. She sketches, in hurried, imprecise strokes, a life of “good stability” and “being with someone who actually knows what he wants,” hears herself adding “proper plan, proper future” for good measure, even as a quieter part of her flinches at how untrue that feels.
From Lena’s side, the whole rush of defence lands with textbook clarity: this is what someone sounds like when they are fiercely protecting a shared plan rather than flirting with possibilities. As Marnie’s voice trips over “we’ve talked about where we’ll be in a few years” and “it just makes sense,” Lena can almost see the arc drawn out, Marnie and Sebastian, London now, perhaps some leafier bit of the Home Counties next, maybe further south again if his work demands it. A smooth, fixed trajectory curving decisively away from Seabridge, sealed not only by affection but by logistics and property ladders.
Lena’s mouth softens into something nearer apology. “If it works for you, that’s… that’s good,” she says at last, retreating a step, unwilling to become the cousin who sneers at anyone else’s escape route. In her head, she neatly files it away as confirmation: Marnie has chosen that world, that man; any flicker of doubt Lena thought she’d glimpsed was merely her own wishful projection. Marnie, catching only the faint weight on “that,” feels the barb instead of the kindness; her shoulders hitch higher, convinced Lena is quietly judging her for “going posh,” for stepping off the shared starting line and onto someone else’s polished track.
An awkward pause opens between them, padded by the flap of a tea towel on the neighbour’s line and a muffled burst of laughter from inside. “I should go help with the pudding,” Lena murmurs, pushing off the cold brick. “Yeah, go on,” Marnie replies, too brisk, already tugging out her phone as armour and camouflage both, thumb flicking pointlessly at the dark screen.
They separate on that thin pretext (Marnie irritated, Lena chastened) their opposing readings setting like concrete: Marnie certain Lena disapproves of her edging toward the polished, southern version of adulthood, Lena certain Marnie is already welded to a long‑term future with Sebastian down south, and neither of them anywhere near the truth of the job offer beckoning from thousands of miles further away.
Will is already sweating slightly despite the cold, fizzing with a cheerfulness that looks a lot like desperation. “Listen, yeah? You hate being told what to do. I hate scraping around doing odd jobs for people who think ‘exposure’ pays the invoice. We build something that’s ours. Proper units on the estate eventually, fleet contracts with the holiday‑let people, maybe a mobile rig we can drive out to those big houses up the headland. They’ve got the motors, they’ve got the money. They just need someone to make it easy for them.”
He says “big houses” with a sort of worship that makes Dominic’s jaw tighten. He drags on the cigarette, the smoke sharp in his chest, and watches Will’s thumbnail flash against his phone screen every time a notification buzzes.
“Will, slow down,” Dominic says. “You’re on about three different businesses now.”
“It’s one business,” Will insists. “It’s the brand. You, me, Seabridge AutoCare or some shit: working title.” He laughs, too loud for the little yard. “You’re the bloke people trust with their engine, I’m the bloke they trust with their card details. You don’t even have to talk to the customers if you don’t fancy. I’ll handle that. You just do what you’re already doing, but for us instead of making some other fella rich.”
“Right,” Dominic says. The word comes out flat. He flicks ash toward the drain, eyeing the pale scum of old rainwater there.
Will barrels on. “You said you were sick of garages in Brum taking the piss, yeah? Long hours, no thanks, no security. This is you going self‑employed, but not in that sad, ‘posting on Facebook for work’ way. This is us, legit. Business account, invoices, everything above board. I’ve got spreadsheets on my laptop. I just. “I just need someone who actually knows what they’re doing under there.”
There it is, under all the froth: the admission that Will can’t do this alone. Dominic feels it land somewhere uncomfortably soft in his chest. The family’s always treated Will as the golden boy with ideas, and Dominic as the lad who could lift heavy things. Being asked, outright, to be the bit that makes it work is…new.
“What about start‑up costs?” Dominic asks, because it’s safer than acknowledging anything else. “Lift, tools, unit, insurance. That not what ‘some suit skimming off the top’ normally pays for?”
Will’s grin flickers, then steadies. “We start small, round here. Use what you’ve already got, what I’ve got. Dad’s mate’s yard till we can get our own space. I’ve got a line on a small loan, maybe an investor. Nothing dodgy,” he adds too quickly. “We keep it lean at first. Sweat equity. Could be massive in a couple of years.”
A couple of years sounds, to Dominic, alarmingly like hope. He looks past Will, over the cracked wall, to where a slice of grey sea shows between roofs. Wind hums in the back gate. Inside, a burst of laughter (Marnie’s, clear as glass) spills through the thin door, followed by his dad’s cough.
He stubs the cigarette out on the brick, feeling Will’s gaze stick to his profile. “Look,” Dominic says, keeping his voice neutral, “I’ll…look at the numbers. When you’ve got ’em all written down proper. See if it stacks up.”
It is, to his mind, almost nothing. A polite deferral, the conversational equivalent of nodding and edging back indoors. But Will straightens as if someone’s plugged him in. “Yeah? Yeah, mate, that’s, no, that’s brilliant. I’ll tidy up the projections tonight, send ’em over. This is it, man. Our garage. You won’t regret it.”
Dominic pushes the door open with his shoulder, the warm, noisy air of the kitchen rushing out to meet them. As Will bounds in ahead, already talking about “our place” to the nearest pair of ears, Dominic lags a step behind, wondering when exactly his half‑sentence turned into a promise.
Will slices the air with his fingers, sketching imaginary signage over the neighbour’s washing line so that “Seabridge AutoCare” floats, in his mind at least, between a pair of greying joggers and a pegged‑up bra. “Picture it,” he says, already half‑breathless. “Proper brand, yeah? Not just ‘Dom’s Garage’ on a bit of MDF nicked from B&Q. Clean logo. Colours that look good on a van. Bookings app so you’re not stuck on the phone with Doris from up the estate. Insta before‑and‑afters, couple of TikToks, show people you’re not some back‑alley bodger.”
He grins, pleased with himself. “We prove you don’t have to be born minted to build something solid. Two lads from round here, no silver spoons, no rich daddy buying ’em a unit.”
The words “born minted” hang there, white in the cold air. Dominic can almost taste them. Inevitably, they drag up the image of Sebastian’s cashmere and vintage watch, of Marnie leaning in toward him inside, laughing at something clever and effortless. The contrast itches under Dominic’s skin, like grit caught between his teeth.
Ash drops onto the concrete as Dominic squints through the smoke, listening past the froth for the shape of what Will’s actually saying: long hours at someone else’s lock‑up, “deferred drawings” instead of wages, his name suddenly welded to another man’s bright ideas and quiet debts. Sweat, risk, hope, in roughly that order.
“Sounds… busy,” he mutters, a non‑answer dressed as an opinion.
Will either doesn’t hear or refuses to. He barrels on, jabbing at his phone with caffeine‑shaky enthusiasm. “Units per week, see? Average ticket, upsell on valets, that’s just the low scenario.” Cells and numbers blur as he angles the screen so Dominic can see but not quite take it. “Margins, cashflow, look, it all lines up if you trust the process.”
“Look, you hate taking orders, yeah? I hate scratching around for pennies. This is us levelling the field. No more feeling like we’re the poor cousins when folk like him, ” Will jerks his chin toward the front of the house, where cashmere and easy laughter live “, rock up in their shiny toys, acting like it’s charity to notice us.”
Dominic exhales slowly, pressure gathering tight behind his eyes. The speech needles all his sore spots at once: pride, money, the memory of walking past those headland drives as a kid. “I’ll…have a look at the numbers,” he says at last, picking each word like it might explode. “Not saying yes. Just… I’ll look. That’s it.”
Will straightens as if a judge has banged a gavel. “Knew you’d get it,” he crows, phone snapped shut like a contract. By the time they squeeze back through the kitchen, steam, gravy fumes, somebody shouting for clean plates, he’s already briefing a hovering cousin on “our garage,” “our units,” “what we’re building next year.” Dominic, edging sideways toward the dining table, files it quietly under Evidence: Verbal Agreements Are A Mug’s Game.
Dominic stops, one hand still on the back of an empty chair, as if he’s interrupted someone else’s life rather than walked back into his own. The album is open flat on the wipe‑clean tablecloth, ring‑bound spine straining, a plastic page cracked in one corner. His dad’s thick forefinger lands again with a papery smack on the cloudy sleeve.
“Always had gold in his hands, that one,” he declares, voice pitched for maximum circulation. An aunt looks up from ladling gravy; another tilts her ear, career gossip abandoned. “Could strip and rebuild anything. Just needed someone to keep him steady, not…” a fractional pause, as if searching for the right register of cruelty “…swan off when it suited.”
A murmur of sympathetic tsks and amused snorts ripples along the table, the family chorus for any line that sounds like both praise and a telling‑off. Dominic feels his neck prickle, heat pushing up under his collar. Fifteen‑year‑old him stares out from the plastic, half‑caught mid‑frown, hands buried in the Fiesta’s innards. Even in freeze‑frame, he looks like he’d rather the camera pack it in and mind its own business.
He can hear his dad’s timing in the words. Set up with “gold in his hands,” the proud boast any father might make, then the turn, the dig, delivered with an indulgent shrug that invites everyone to agree he’s a hopeless case who might yet have been saved if only he’d behaved better.
Lena sits angled toward the album, one elbow near his dad’s mug, cardigan cuff damp where it’s brushed a ring of condensation. She makes a small, neutral sound that could be appreciation of mechanical talent or of the photograph itself. Dominic sees, with a twinge of gratitude and discomfort, that she does not laugh.
The words hit the tableware as surely as if he’d lobbed a fork. Dominic feels the old shame rise on cue, a slow, involuntary burn that starts at his collar and creeps up the back of his neck. He can feel, with the strange double‑hearing that comes from growing up in these rooms, exactly how the last two words have been tuned: light enough to win a chuckle, sharp enough to lodge under his skin. A joke for the gathering; a charge sheet for the prodigal, carefully itemised.
Lena, still perched beside his dad with the album skewed halfway between them, sees Dominic’s jaw go rope‑tight, the muscle ticking once. His gaze slides, almost in self‑defence, toward the front room. She follows it.
From here, the doorway is a little theatre proscenium. Marnie’s laugh lifts clear over the TV murmur and clink of cutlery, bright as a bell; Sebastian’s profile is caught in the blue‑white wash of the screen, cashmere neat against the sagging arm of the sofa. They look curated, she thinks wryly, as if someone has staged a campaign about “where you could be, if you played it right.”
Dominic’s dad doesn’t quite look at Marnie and Sebastian, but his gaze drifts to the doorway and sets, mouth flattening as if he’s bitten off the rest of the sentence for the sake of the gravy. “Some folk,” he mutters, thumb worrying the cloudy edge of plastic, “always had one foot on the ferry, didn’t they? Couldn’t just get on with what’s here.”
The words land in the narrow room like steam off the pans: everywhere at once. They hover, carefully ownerless, over his son who left in a clapped‑out Fiesta before sunrise, and over his niece, who returns bearing a soft‑voiced southerner and talk of glass lifts and meeting rooms with views. Underneath, the burr of resentment carries shipyard closures, rusting winches, boats sold for scrap, kids disappearing up the A‑road and not writing back, as if the whole town were something you stepped off rather than belonged to.
Lena senses the talk tipping toward a roll‑call of who stayed loyal and who traded up. Gently, she thumbs the plastic back a leaf to a sun‑faded spread of the harbour rammed with trawlers, masts like a forest. “These are brilliant,” she says, voice low but distinct. “What was it like when all the boats were still going out? My gran used to say you could hear engines from four in the morning, rumbling through the walls.” It is an invitation to narrative rather than judgment, a lane he knows. His shoulders ease a fraction; he squints at the picture, fingertip following the ghosted names along the hulls, boats scrapped, sold, or simply absent now, lips moving once as if silently counting the losses.
He obliges, at first cautiously, then with the slow, gathering rhythm of someone who has told this history often and never quite been heard. Skippers who drank themselves hollow in the Anchor, lads who never came back from the ’98 storm, the last big trawler flogged “to some bloke down south with more money than sense.” Lena lets the tide of it roll through her, the detail and the grievance braided so tightly they are indistinguishable. In her head the cramped dining room redraws itself along fault‑lines: Sebastian’s cashmere and careful charm as the glossy incoming tide; Marnie, light‑footed, skimming its surface; and opposite them Dominic’s dad, Will with his jittery pitches, and Dominic himself (set jaw, oil‑scarred hands) a makeshift sea wall, holding for now against a shoreline that is giving way inch by inch.
Sebastian steers Marnie toward the far end of the sofa, away from the best sight‑line to the kitchen door, where older aunts tend to materialise with washing‑up updates and veiled questions. He arranges himself with the unstudied precision of a man used to being given room: knees angled, one arm over the sofa back, creating a neat little cordon of cashmere between them and the rest of the room. His back takes the brunt of the view; to anyone glancing over, they are simply a handsome couple in quiet consultation, not a campaign strategy meeting.
The TV burbles on with an old game show repeat, the room punctuated by bursts of laughter and the clack of cutlery against plates. A cousin shouts something about the score; someone else replies from the doorway. Sebastian lowers his voice just enough that Marnie has to incline her head to catch it. The movement makes them look, from across the room, like a study in easy intimacy: her copper‑brown hair catching the lamplight as she leans in, his profile turned to her with apparent devotion.
He is careful not to touch her more than the situation strictly requires; one hand rests near, not on, her knee, the other draped in a way that frames rather than hems her in. It is choreography as much as conversation, the sort of subtle blocking that ensures any watching relative must, if they are inclined to gossip later, admit that “they seemed very close, you know, talking proper serious.”
To Marnie, pressed into their little enclave of lowered voices and flickering TV‑light, it feels less like closeness and more like being gently manoeuvred into position on a family chessboard. She can almost feel the eyes from the armchairs clocking their orientation and filing it away.
“Nothing you’d have to stand by,” he adds smoothly, as if discussing the weather, not the rest of her life. “A line here, a mention there. Your dad hears we’ve been browsing Rightmove in the area, your mum hears we’ve talked about schools. She’ll knit the rest together herself. People hear ‘we’ and ‘next few years’ and it settles them. Takes the edge off.”
He lets it hang, giving her space to imagine the scene: some aunt relaying, with satisfaction, that Marnie and Sebastian are “thinking long‑term here, actually,” her parents’ shoulders dropping a fraction, the small glow of having something solid to boast about at church or in the Co‑op queue. It is all presented as a kindness, a service he can render with the effortless currency of his surname and his tone.
“Just to keep them off your back,” he finishes, the picture of generous forbearance. “We can always… reframe later, if we need to. But it would calm the waters tonight. And, frankly, it wouldn’t do us any harm for people to see we’re… settled.”
She feels each pin go in, neat as a dressmaker tacking her into something that may or may not fit. It is not only talk of houses and vague “next steps”; it is the quiet business of fixing her in the family imagination as already accounted for, already ticketed onto a particular line. Once the story exists, it will spread itself: Marnie and Sebastian looking at places, Marnie finally settled, Marnie not drifting after all. Behind his soft, reasonable murmur she hears the machinery. Heading off tiresome questions, neutralising any local contenders before they know they have applied, turning this cramped front room into a small public‑relations triumph for “them” as a couple. For him, she thinks; his reputation, his narrative, his tidy future.
She lets the performance rise up around her like armour: wattage turned up, chin tipped just so, bright smile, eyes widening with mock‑bashful complicity, fingers curling around his sleeve in a gesture her mother will instantly translate as “serious.” “If it keeps them off my back tonight, fine,” she says, pitching it as a joke. “We’ll give them a show.” Beneath the glitter, a quieter abacus clicks: seven days until she must answer the offer abroad, seven days in which every “we” uttered tonight must remain plausibly deniable, flimsy enough to fold later into “oh, we were only talking, you know what families are like.”
Sebastian’s shoulders loosen, satisfied; he hears assent, hears “we” as a settled fact, already slotting her into some future Christmas card list and parish newsletter. Marnie, meanwhile, files the whole exchange under “temporary camouflage”. A script she can later downgrade to “we were only talking, you know what families are like,” if she does, in the end, vanish over an ocean. When they rise and drift toward the doorway, her hand still resting on his arm at precisely the angle her mother reads as promise, anyone glancing in from the kitchen will see exactly what Sebastian intends them to: a united front, apparently edging toward roots in Seabridge, the room’s gossip equilibrium gently, falsely reassured.
Ryan lets the gap close in again once the uncle has gone, bodies funnelling past with plates and refilled glasses. He shifts his weight, easy as if he’s only trying to stay out of the way, and says it lightly into the space Will’s enthusiasm leaves. “If you do end up sketching anything out between you,” he nods between them as if the partnership were already inked, “happy to give it a quick look. Contracts, lenders, that sort of thing. Off the clock. Just so nobody gets stitched up for something they didn’t quite agree to.”
Will’s grin widens as if a starter pistol has gone off. “See? Told you it’s proper, Dom. Ryan does this stuff for a living. That’s, like, a seal of approval, that is.” His phone buzzes and he half‑glances at it, thumb twitching, but he pockets it again with forced nonchalance. “We’ll have numbers by next week, easy.”
Dominic feels the familiar prickle at the back of his neck. A word like “numbers” always seems to arrive with a side order of disappointment. “I just said I’d look,” he reminds, flattening the phrase so it lies there, unhelpful. “See if it makes sense.”
“And that,” Ryan returns, still mild, “is when it’s useful to have someone who enjoys the small print.” His tone makes “enjoys” sound faintly ridiculous, a private joke at his own expense. His eyes, however, rest on Dominic rather than Will, gauging the depth of resistance. “No strings, honestly. I dislike nasty surprises almost as much as I dislike extra paperwork.”
Will hears the first half, no strings, seal of approval, and bounces on his heels, already narrating the future out loud. Dominic hears the second and something in his shoulders draws up another fraction. Ryan clocks both responses with professional neatness, filing away where reassurance lands and where it glances off. In a house where everyone’s selling some version of themselves, he is content, for now, to be the one offering to read the terms and conditions.
Will’s patter gathered pace like a dodgy engine revving too high. Turnover figures spilled out and Ryan let the numbers wash over him just long enough to sketch the outline in his head. Optimistic margins. A “mate” of a supplier whose name never quite landed. No word at all about what happened if tourist season rained off or a van went to the wall.
Every time Will’s spiel brushed a risky patch, his voice hopped a gear, skimming over the detail with cheerful speed. “Only need a bit of capital to unlock it, really,” he assured the uncle, grinning, hands drawing invisible bar charts in the air. Dominic, at his side, went a shade more still. His jaw worked once, a quiet clench at that “only,” as if the word pressed directly on some half‑healed bruise.
The uncle, already glazing under the onslaught of acronyms and “pipelines,” gave a vague, approving “Aye, well, good on you,” and a meaty clap to Will’s shoulder before drifting gratefully toward the safer chaos of the front room, leaving the scheme hanging in the narrow space like steam.
Ryan steps neatly into the space the uncle leaves, adjusting by inches until the corridor itself seems to have rearranged around him: half a polite blockage to further escape, half an open flank turned towards Dominic. “Sounds like you’re cooking up something ambitious,” he observes, voice pitched to the same register people use for the weather and roadworks, nothing here to startle a witness. He lets the word ambitious hang a fraction too long, then softens it with a small, self‑deprecating smile. “If you do end up putting anything on paper I’m happy to give it a quick look. Off the clock,” he adds, as if that were the trivial part. “Just so nobody discovers the small print the hard way later.”
Will snaps up the offer as if it stamps the whole thing as already half‑signed. “See? That’s what I’m saying: proper job, this,” he crows, clapping Ryan’s arm, flicking Dominic a triumphant told‑you look. Dominic, catching “agreements” and “loan” through kettle scream and TV babble, feels that old neck‑prickle; “off the clock” sounds less like kindness than a barbed hook wrapped in wool.
Ryan clocks the tiny shifts: Will’s eyes bright, already inflating “quick look” into a guaranteed green light; Dominic’s shoulders knotting, gaze skidding sideways as if dodging a clipboard. He banks both reactions, his smile edging warmer for Dominic, crisper for Will. Quietly, he redraws the triangle, installing himself as the calm buffer between turbocharged spreadsheets and wary, oil‑scarred hands, future gratitude and leverage both neatly in reach.
They are not so much gathered as compressed, pressed into a temporary intimacy by the physics of too many relations in too little space. The hallway has given up all pretence of being a corridor and become instead a holding pen for damp coats, plastic carrier bags, and errant elbows. Someone at the far end curses the buggy (“No, you’ve got to lift the front bit, not just ram it, Gary, for God’s sake”) and the whole press of bodies shudders like a blocked artery.
In the small rearrangement that follows, Lena finds herself with her spine against the wall, the cool magnolia paint tacky under her cardigan, one ankle nudging the shoe rack. A collapsed umbrella pokes her calf. Ryan, attempting to be helpful about the buggy and then sensibly retreating, ends up half‑twisted in front of her, angled sideways to let an aunt edge past with a tray. Each time someone squeezes by, he has to lean in a fraction; his shoulder passes within an inch of hers, bringing with it the clean, warm scent of his aftershave, momentarily displacing the heavier atmosphere of chip fat and detergent.
Overhead, coats sway on an overloaded rail, dripping faintly onto the lino. The air is thick with damp wool, talc, and a sweet, indistinguishable perfume that must have seemed subtle in the chemist’s. Snatches of argument from the front room ricochet down the narrow space, football, parking, who’s had too much already, merging with the hiss of the kettle and the television’s muffled laughter. Any conversation has to be smuggled through in fragments, riding the small lulls between someone shouting “Mind the baby!” and an uncle’s boom of “You don’t know you’re born.”
In that eddy of enforced proximity, just far enough from the kitchen to be almost private and just close enough to the front door to feel the draught, Lena and Ryan are, for a moment, no one’s relatives and everyone’s audience.
Lena tilts her head toward the half‑open front door where a slice of grey sky shows, the draught fingering the hem of her dress. “It seems busier, but smaller somehow,” she says, more to herself than to him. “Like…more people, less room to breathe. Or less room that’s actually ours.”
Ryan follows her gaze to the narrow triangle of street: a flash of high‑vis jacket, a pram wheel bumping the kerb, a car crawling past too slowly, looking for parking. He huffs a soft laugh, eyes tracking a kid who darts between them with a fistful of crisps and an untied shoelace. “Places like this,” he replies, “coming back starts to feel like visiting a museum you used to live in. All the exhibits familiar, but someone’s moved the labels. And put a gift shop where your bedroom was.”
His tone is light, almost throwaway, but he watches how carefully she nods, how her mouth tightens for a second and then smooths. She pushes her glasses up with an ink‑stained thumb, considering.
“A museum,” she says slowly. “Only half the guides still work here, and the rest are…consultants.”
They worry at the idea in short, overlapping questions: how long are you up for; do you still call it home; where’s work, really; do you miss it when you’re away. Lena offers “a university down south” with a tiny, deflecting tilt of her head, as if the exact city were an indulgent detail. She says she’s “just here for a bit, seeing how things have shifted,” the phrase balanced carefully between research trip and family duty.
Ryan replies that he’s “around the coast a lot for clients, in and out,” the rhythm of the words rehearsed. Seabridge, he adds, is “one of those places people underestimate until they realise how much money flows quietly through it.” Neither of them names Dominic or Marnie, but every sentence bends around those absences, like furniture arranged not to block a locked door.
As the hallway clogs and thins in waves, they test each other with more pointed, still‑polite probes. Lena notes that “busier” often really means “more people who can leave whenever they like,” her glance straying toward the muffled laughter where Sebastian’s cut‑glass vowels occasionally pierce the din. Ryan concedes that outside money “reshapes a place quicker than the people who actually live here,” that some end up “priced off their own streets while being told it’s progress. Good for them, really.” The flicker of mutual recognition when their eyes meet is brief but exacting: they are, each in their own idiom, quietly surveying the same fault lines and wondering who will fall in.
An aunt barrels between them with a tray of plates, perfume and gravy cutting the air, and Lena flattens herself against wallpaper she remembers from Year 9. By the time the human tide recedes, they’ve both re‑equipped neutral smiles, as if nothing important has passed. Still, Lena quietly shelves Ryan under “possibly on our side,” the sort who can read a seating plan as class cartography and might, when it counts, prefer neighbours to investors.
Ryan, for his part, files her away with professional neatness: further evidence that Dominic’s generation wears its unease like a second coat. Already he is sketching how one might present leaving as the logical next chapter, ambition rather than flight, with himself, naturally, as the dependable adviser who knows both the paperwork and the quickest roads out of town.
Will circles back to Dominic with the momentum of someone who has just talked himself into believing his own pitch, phone aloft like a talisman. The screen glows with half‑finished logos. “Look,” he says, thumbs skittering, “I’ve mocked up three versions of the brand already, Harlow & Sutton Auto, Sutton & Harlow Motors, or just HARLOW, nice and clean. People love a heritage name. Proper garage, valeting, detailing, the lot. Online bookings, subscription packages, loyalty scheme. We do premium: ceramic coating, pick‑up and drop‑off, the works. No more crawling round on your back for some foreman who thinks diagnostics is witchcraft.”
He stabs at a colour‑coded spreadsheet, lines of numbers and hopeful projections marching neatly down the screen. “This is the cash flow if we start small. Mobile valeting, then a unit down the industrial estate once we scale. I’ve priced in your rates proper, none of this ‘mate’s rates’ rubbish. We structure it fifty‑fifty. Your hands, my head. Local lads made good. Imagine it: we’re the go‑to name from here to the ring road.”
Dominic leans against the kitchen doorframe, the wood digging into his shoulder blade. He watches the little bars climb and curve on the graph, neat arcs of optimism. His jaw works as if he’s chewing something tough. Will’s enthusiasm bounces off him and ricochets around the cramped room.
“Yeah,” Dominic says eventually, the word coming out flatter than he intends. “Looks… busy.”
Will barrels through the pause. “Busy’s good. Busy means booked solid. I’ve already had a quiet word with a couple of lads up the caravan park, and old Mrs Jeffers with the Merc: she hates trekking to the city. People trust a Harlow under a bonnet, Dom. That’s the brand. You. Not some faceless chain.”
Dominic nods once, twice, just enough to keep the torrent flowing. The earlier, offhand promise to “look at the numbers” now sits in his gut like something swallowed hastily and ill‑judged. He can already hear his dad’s verdict, taste the family post‑mortem if it all goes wrong: there he goes again, chasing schemes.
“Send us it,” he says at last, eyes on the phone rather than Will. “Email or whatever. I’ll… have a proper look when it’s quiet.”
To Will, the sentence lands like a handshake: shoulders loosening, grin widening, already planning follow‑up messages and site visits. To Dominic, it feels perilously close to yes, a tiny, polite nod that might yet drag his whole life back into streets he thought he’d escaped, with his own surname painted six feet high on a shutter he’s not sure he wants to own.
At the dining table, Dominic’s dad leans back with a wince, one hand pressed briefly to his ribs before he reaches for the cooling teapot. The spoon rattles faintly against the mug as he tops it up, the movement more habit than desire. “Always someone with a bloody plan,” he mutters to the nearest uncle, steam fogging his glasses. His gaze strays, not quite idly, toward the front room where Sebastian’s cut‑glass laugh rises above the television and the shriek of a game show audience. “Town did fine without consultants and online bookings, back when folk just grafted. You wanted owt doing, you went round, you asked, you paid what you could. None of this… pitch deck carry‑on.”
The uncle grunts, shifting his weight on the dining chair that’s older than half the people in the room. “Aye. Till the posh incomers started buying up terraces for holiday lets. One weekend a month, blinds shut rest of the time. Then telling us it’s ‘revitalising’ the area.” Another uncle chimes in about “heritage walks” and “artisan fishcakes,” and the low murmur swells into a familiar, defensive chorus: better the devil you know than some stranger with a brochure and a vision for “fixing” Seabridge.
Dominic, half‑turned toward the telly, catches only the silhouette of them at first: Sebastian bent a little, offering his wrist, Marnie rising on her toes to neaten a cuff that already looks like it’s been ironed by staff. It reads, to his eye, less like affection and more like final checks before sending a product out on the shop floor.
“So if anyone asks,” she says, voice pitched to carry just to the sofas, “we’re just… keeping our options open. Maybe thinking about somewhere with a sea view that isn’t falling down.”
Sebastian accepts the line as if they rehearsed it. “And of course,” he replies, clear as an announcement, “we’re very committed to the area. Long term.”
Dominic’s mouth twitches. Around here, “committed to the area” usually meant your car had failed its MOT and you couldn’t afford the parts. Her laugh rings out, showy as tinsel; her eyes, though, are already on the rain‑blurred slice of sea beyond the net curtain, measuring not square footage but exits. For the benefit of whoever is listening, they look like a couple gazing toward a shared future. From Dominic’s angle, it’s two people practising different scripts on the same small stage.
Lena lingers by the arch between kitchen and front room, notebook still zipped in her tote, both hands cupped round a mug gone tepid. She watches Dominic tilt almost imperceptibly out of Will’s orbit, his gaze sliding to the back door, then to his dad, then to the rain‑dulled slice of sea. Each flicker reads like field notes: futures proposed, allegiances assumed, escape routes mentally underlined. Loyalty here is never neutral, she thinks; it is always to somewhere, and against something else. She says nothing, simply lets the patterning settle, the sociologist and the girl who once sat beside Dominic in registration both quietly, inconveniently awake.
Ryan, meanwhile, moves like oil through water. Never lingering long enough to be pinned, always reappearing with a fresh drink or a casual, “You two sorted for lifts back later?” Each enquiry is framed as politeness, never pressure. He plants small hooks as he goes: a quiet word to Dominic about “free second opinions on loan terms, no strings,” a reassuring nod to Will that “scaling carefully beats going in too hard, especially round here,” a half‑joking aside to an aunt about “making sure the town doesn’t get stitched up by the fine print when the brochures arrive.” He laughs at himself whenever anyone hints at him being “the lawyer in the room,” as if the idea were faintly absurd. By the time the first fat drops of rain splatter against the glass and someone curses about the washing, he has drifted to the middle of things almost by accident, apparently neutral, apparently helpful, the reasonable centre of a room full of competing certainties, ready, should the storm break, to offer shelter to whichever side looks most worth backing.
The door keeps slamming against its stopper in a jerky rhythm as bodies funnel in, each bang admitting a new gust of cold air and that particular wet‑gravel, chip‑fat smell of Seabridge in bad weather. The hallway floor is instantly slicked a mottled dark by dripping shoes. Someone’s supermarket carrier splits with a treacherous sigh on the threshold; a dozen oranges skitter like startled crabs under the shoe rack and radiator, bumping against skirting boards and ankles. A lanky teenager mutters “for, ” and remembers, too late, that there are aunties present, finishing the word under his breath as he dives after the fruit, nearly taking out an umbrella stand.
Coats are shrugged off in clumsy, space‑eating gestures, raindrops flung onto the magnolia walls and framed school photos. Dominic gets an elbow in the ribs and a hood in his face, the nylon cold and wet against his cheek, as someone wrestles with a zip that has chosen this moment to jam. The familiar smell of his mum’s washing powder battles with damp wool and the sharper note of someone’s posh aftershave.
“Just stick it anywhere, love,” his mum calls from the kitchen, which is not, Dominic thinks, advice that ought ever to be taken literally in this house. Obediently, coats are dumped wherever there is the smallest suggestion of surface: over chair backs, along the banister in sagging rows, on the newel post so that the first step of the stairs becomes a hidden trip hazard. A plastic mac slides slowly off the arm of the hallway chair and puddles on the floor, unnoticed, to be trodden on repeatedly.
The corridor narrows by the second, transformed from passageway to soft, rustling obstacle course. Every movement now requires a sideways shuffle, a braced stomach, and an apology that mostly goes unheard, swallowed by the scrape of chair legs, the thud of more arriving feet, and the steady drum of rain against the front window. Dominic flattens himself against the wall to let an elderly cousin manoeuvre past with a walking stick and a plastic trifle bowl, catching a glimpse through the open living‑room door of knees, backs, and the spinning reflection of the ceiling light in the black TV screen before another burst of bodies closes the gap again.
In the front room, an uncle jabs at the volume button on the remote with damp fingers, leaving a little constellation of rain on the plastic as he insists he “just wants to catch the headlines.” The television obligingly roars to life, the newsreader’s clipped urgency swelling to compete with the rain’s rattle and the overlapping chatter. A red BREAKING NEWS banner scrolls past something about rail strikes and rising prices before dissolving into footage of floods someplace even greyer.
In the corner, the smaller television that had been babysitting the younger cousins throws out a high‑pitched cartoon theme tune, two adverts behind the main set. The sound ricochets around the low ceiling in a grotesque duet with the news. Someone stabs the little set’s power button to stop the cacophony. Instantly, a chorus of outraged wails detonates, one toddler going rigid on the carpet, face turning an impressive beetroot as he howls betrayal at the adult world.
The kitchen fogs up within minutes, steam from the kettle and the pan of curry mixing with the humid breath of too many people. Condensation pearls on the window and starts to drip onto the sill, where a row of family photos grows faintly speckled, smiles blurring under a film of their own descendants’ exhalations. The lino grows tacky underfoot; every step is a small, reluctant peel. Two aunties try to pass behind each other at the same time, arms full of plates and sausage rolls, and end up locked in an awkward dance of “Sorry, love, no, you go, no, you,” hips bumping the cupboard doors, as someone behind them bellows for more mugs and another yells that there’s no clean teaspoons left.
At the table, chairs scrape and judder as latecomers attempt to wedge themselves into gaps that exist only in theory. Elbows meet ribs; someone’s paper plate slews sideways, shedding crisps into an unattended handbag. Phone screens glow with half‑loaded messages and spinning wheels before surrendering to “No Service,” provoking a wave of aggrieved groans and a chorus of, “Typical, this house,” from the younger cousins.
Dominic’s, predictably, gives up just as a notification from the garage app pings, freezing on a blurred thumbnail that might be trouble and might be spam. Beside him, a cousin in a cropped hoodie, trapped in the doorway with a paper plate and a baby welded to her hip, snaps that if people would just “pick a room and stay in it,” they might all be able to breathe. The baby, catching the frayed edge in her voice, screws up its face in ominous prelude.
The din mounts in ragged tiers: a bellow from the hallway about whose soaking trainers are bleeding mud onto the doormat; an uncle amplifying himself to recycle the same punchline for a third, benevolent torture; a teenager insisting they were “there first” as an elder commands them to “shift up, make room.” The kettle crashes into a rolling boil, shrieking beneath the extractor’s weary drone, so that every remark must be launched like ammunition merely to arrive at its target.
The uncle’s words cut through the overlapping conversations, his voice riding the kettle’s shriek as he yanks Will in against his side, sloshing beer dangerously close to the paper plates. Faces nearby tilt toward them automatically, scenting a performance before they’ve even caught the punchline. The uncle’s breath is warm with lager and onions; his grin is the expansive kind that announces he has an audience now and does not intend to waste it.
Dominic, wedged between a radiator and the corner of the table, feels the shift in the air before he registers the actual words. It’s the way people lean: shoulders angling, spines straightening, the natural tide of bodies in a small kitchen turning toward potential embarrassment. Years away haven’t dulled his instinct for it; if anything, they’ve sharpened it. Trouble, like rust, has a particular smell.
He watches the uncle’s hand clamp on Will’s shoulder. Too tight to be affectionate, too demonstrative to be casual. The can wobbles, froth trembling at the rim, and Dominic’s eye, trained to flinch at any unnecessary mess, follows the threat of spillage with a mechanic’s fatalistic attention.
On the far side of the table, a cousin’s laugh dies mid‑cackle; someone’s anecdote about a caravan holiday is abandoned half‑finished, its moral left to fend for itself. The TV in the front room blares a canned cheer that drifts in, off‑timed applause for the wrong spectacle. Even the extractor fan seems, for a breath, to fall back into the role of mere background, the true engine of the room now the uncle’s swollen sense of occasion.
Dominic feels his shoulders crawl. He knows this script: praise that is really a claim, a joke that is really a bill presented in public so no one can refuse to pay.
Will forces a lopsided grin, more grimace than glee, shoulders tightening under the uncle’s meaty arm as “proper posh connections” goes up like a firework over the table. The words seem to bounce off the steamed‑up windows, echoed in a couple of appreciative whoops from cousins who haven’t thought further than the joke. Dominic sees Will’s jaw flicker, the tiny, helpless wince before he pastes on brightness and ducks his head, as if the angle might make him a smaller target.
The uncle’s chin jerks toward Sebastian with theatrical relish, the gesture broad enough to snag the whole room. Conversation frays. Phones lower, blue light draining from faces; a fork stalls mid‑air, gravy threatening to drip onto a paper napkin printed with cartoon holly. From the front room, the TV’s canned laughter bleeds in and then seems to hesitate, drowned out by the sudden hush of listening.
Even the toddler on the sofa, who has been working herself up to a full‑throated wail for the last five minutes, hiccups into silence, thumb paused halfway to her mouth, eyes swivelling with everyone else’s to see what will happen next.
“Langley money,” repeated and embroidered as “old money” and “proper brass” by a couple of voices, hangs in the steam‑fog like a label someone has pinned on a specimen. A few older relatives exchange those small, satisfied snorts that mean they have already accounted for this new resource on the family spreadsheet in their heads, right next to who lent who fifty quid in 1998 and never saw it again. Dominic can feel the calculation thicken the air.
Sebastian, pinned neatly between the sideboard and the fridge like an exhibit in tasteful knitwear, blinks once behind the rising curl of kettle steam. For the briefest instant his face is nakedly startled, then the shutters glide down: features arranging themselves into a pleasantly unreadable neutrality as the room’s attention clicks onto him.
His eventual laugh arrives half a second too late and just a little too polished, the precise, upholstered sound he might deploy over champagne flutes at a networking reception. He shifts his paper plate with an air of having been interrupted mid‑choreography, then remarks in crisp, careful tones that there has been “no discussion of anything so formal,” that last word dropping like a discreet little velvet rope between himself and the sticky lino, the steam, the staring faces.
Colour surges up Will’s neck into his ears, a rash of blotchy pink creeping above his collar. He ducks his head, half‑laughing, half‑choking, insisting they’ve only “chatted ideas, that’s all,” his voice snagging on the final word so it comes out thin and adolescent. Around them, heads angle together: “posh,” “investment,” “garage,” sifted, priced, and filed for future obligation, opportunity and ammunition.
Marnie, who can smell a scene brewing faster than most people notice the kettle boiling, pitches her voice up and over the cross‑talk, a bright laugh already wrapped round the words like foil. She leans back against the edge of the doorway as if she’s on a stage rather than wedged between the fridge and a sagging coat rack, and announces, too loudly to be casual, that everyone is being ridiculous, “proper soap‑opera, honestly, you’re all acting like this is the last time we’ll see each other.”
The line is shaped for a reaction, complete with lifted eyebrows and a theatrical little shiver of mock‑melodrama, as though any second there will be dramatic music and a slow zoom on whoever looks most tragic. A couple of cousins dutifully let out brief, brittle snorts, grateful for something, anything, that isn’t the word “money.” One of the uncles barks a laugh that sounds more like a cough. Someone in the front room turns the TV down a notch, like the house itself is leaning in to see whether she can actually pull this off.
It should work; it usually does. This is one of her tricks: name the tension, push it half an inch into farce, and let everyone step across the gap as if the whole thing had been a shared joke all along. But tonight the air is too thick, the calculations too freshly exposed. Her joke hangs there, gleaming and insubstantial, like a balloon bobbing above a crowd that has remembered it is, collectively, middle‑aged and tired.
Dominic, three feet away and pretending intense interest in the pattern of the lino, feels the words snag somewhere low in his chest. Last time. The phrase glances off his father upstairs, off all the years he has not been here, off the unspoken question of how long you can keep leaving before you simply don’t come back at all. He watches the room swallow the joke without quite digesting it, and knows, with a small, sour twist of recognition, that even Marnie’s polished patter is slipping on this particular patch of ground.
Her declaration cleaves through the muddle of canned laughter and competing anecdotes, sharp enough that even the TV’s glow seems to falter. For a moment there is the ragged sound of people changing gears: forks pausing halfway to mouths, the kettle’s rattle briefly promoted to main percussion. A couple of relatives produce obedient little chuckles, the sort of duty laughs that say we recognise this as banter and would very much like it to succeed. One of the teenagers huffs something that might be amusement or might just be boredom. The humour, however, never quite takes; it skims over the surface of the room like a stone that ought, by rights, to skip and instead sinks on the second bounce.
Marnie feels it slipping: can sense, with the practised instincts of someone who earns her living in meetings, that this particular slide in her presentation is not landing with the usual appreciative murmurs. Rather than retreat, she doubles down. Her chin lifts a fraction, shoulders squaring into performance mode, as if sheer momentum might yet bully the moment into becoming the light scene change she intended, instead of the overture to something heavier.
“Honestly,” she says, hands slicing the air in a show of amused impatience, “it’s not like I’m moving to the other side of the world.” She sells it as an off‑the‑cuff flourish, the sort of throwaway exaggeration people are meant to bat back with a joke about postcards and time zones. But the line has corners. Dominic hears them; so does Lena. There is a tightness at the back of Marnie’s jaw that does not belong to whimsy, a fractional hesitation before “not” that sounds, to ears primed for such things, like a rehearsal slipping out under the gloss. The fantasy she pretends to mock is, unmistakably, one she has already tried on in the mirror.
The words land in the steamy little kitchen with an emotional thud that seems, for a beat, louder than the kettle. Conversation stutters. Near the doorway, Lena’s whole body stills, as if braced against a sudden gust. Her gaze snaps to Marnie, glasses catching the light, eyes narrowing with the practised alertness of someone trained to hear what has been very carefully not said.
Dominic’s mum, nerves already strung tight, swivels from the hob, tea‑towel twisted between her hands, smile stretched too wide as she asks, far too brightly, what exactly Marnie means by that. The question lands with a brittle little tinkle, half‑joke, half‑interrogation. By the counter, Sebastian straightens almost imperceptibly, shifting his weight toward her, expression smoothing into courteous interest while his eyes sharpen, cool and intent, tracking every flicker of her mouth for proof that the joke is, in fact, a rehearsal for departure.
Will barrels over Dominic’s mum’s question with a burst of brightness so sudden it is almost aggressive, phone still clamped in his hand like a prop he has forgotten how to put down.
“Look, this is exactly what I’ve been saying, Dom. Our place, our brand, proper Seabridge lads doing it right.”
He hits “our” as if it is a magic word, incantatory, already printed on invoices and hoodies. His free hand wheels out in a broad arc, the movement too big for the narrow strip of lino; his elbow skims a hanging mug and sets it clinking on its hook. Clearing the air, he would say. Clearing the crockery, Dominic thinks, flattening himself another inch against the fridge door.
Will plants himself as if on a makeshift stage between the sink and the doorway, chin up, shoulders squared, the checked shirt sitting just so, like he’s doing a pitch in some co‑working space rather than in a kitchen that smells of chip fat and damp tea‑towels. The smartwatch on his wrist flashes with a notification he doesn’t look at, though everyone nearby sees the tiny square of light and the way the tendons in his neck tighten.
“Us,” he insists, eyes bright with caffeine and something sharper. “Not them lot with their second homes and stupid beach huts. Our town, our rules. We know this place, yeah? We grew up here. That’s the whole hook.”
His gaze locks on Dominic with the intensity of a salesman sighting that rarest of species: a lead with skills and a conscience to be leveraged. He grins. A fraction too wide, teeth just a shade too clenched.
“You and me,” he says, as if the partnership is long established and only the paperwork is tardy. “Our garage, our name over the door. None of this clocking in for someone else’s boss and crawling back here knackered on a Friday night. We build something that’s ours. People round here respect that.”
The word “respect” hangs there, faintly accusatory, as though it is something Dominic has been negligent in securing. He feels the familiar flush crawling up the back of his neck, heat prickling under his collar. The fridge hums against his spine like an irritable animal.
Around them, the room adjusts itself around Will’s monologue. Dominic’s mum, question neatly steamrollered, turns back to her mugs a little too quickly, banging them down with brisk precision that fools no one. Sebastian’s head tilts a degree, the kind of minute, lazy curiosity of a man used to having “our” mean shares and trust funds rather than a rented unit off the bypass. Lena, squashed near the doorway, flicks a look from Will to Dominic as if mentally drafting a footnote about consent and collective pronouns.
“Proper Seabridge lads,” Will repeats, tasting the phrase, rolling it round his mouth as if it might come out as a slogan. “Doing it right this time.”
“You’ll see,” Will barrels on, turning the wattage of his smile up a fraction, voice a notch too loud for a room already full of overlapping noise. He rides straight over the blare of the TV from the front room and the rising whine of a toddler somewhere near the stairs. “Our seaside setup, yeah? Garage, full valeting, proper detailing, merch. Our future.”
He savours the word in the same way he has been savouring “our,” as if repetition will make it legally binding. “No more you drifting about, taking whatever comes. We get you rooted. Put your skills to use here, not lining someone else’s pockets.”
An older cousin, half wedged in the doorway with a plate of sausage rolls balanced precariously on one palm, seizes the cue with boozy cheer. “Aye, be grand when our Dom finally settles, won’t it?” he crows. “Stops gallivanting all over the shop, comes home, grows up a bit.”
The chuckle that follows is broad and self‑satisfied, as if he has delivered a kindly truth rather than a sentence.
The laughter that follows is all broad grins and nudges, but the words themselves queue up with bureaucratic patience: finally settles, stops gallivanting, grows up. Each phrase seems to arrive with its own little clipboard and form for him to sign. Dominic feels them lodging, neat as bolts dropped down a drain. The laminate under his boots suddenly seems to tilt, a cheap, shiny sea; the greasy warmth from the oven breathes against his legs, thick as another body. Shoulders already rounded from too many hours under bonnets and beneath ramps, he folds in further, back half‑trapped against the fridge door, nowhere to step that wouldn’t mean shoving someone, drawing more eyes, confirming that he is, as ever, the awkward one making a scene.
Heat crawls from his collarbones to his ears in a slow, suffocating tide. Every “our” from Will lands like a grab at his throat, every chuckled aside like a verdict on the life he has conspicuously failed to assemble. Steam, chip fat, somebody’s too‑strong aftershave; it all thickens the air. The room’s noise flattens to a single waspish buzz in his skull, mingling with the fridge’s fretful hum. When another relative, voice bright as tinfoil, chirps about him “finally staying put this time,” the words snag on something raw; his temper slips its leash before he can drag it back down.
“Has anyone actually asked if I want any of that?” he hears himself say, sharper, louder than he meant, the words cracking across the steam‑fogged kitchen like a dropped tray. He lists them spitting each back as if the syllables taste foul. For a beat, the TV’s babble, the kettle’s rising shriek, even the toddler’s wail in the hall seem to drop behind glass; what he’s saying takes up all the air. The eyes that swing towards him only harden his resolve. He goes on, the anger that has been pacing in him for years finally finding a door: accusing them of treating Seabridge as a picturesque backdrop for their success stories, a set they can pose on in summer before retreating to their real lives, not the place you slog through when it’s January, the wind comes straight off the North Sea, your hands crack from cold, and the shifts vanish with the tourists.
The silence after Dominic’s outburst is so complete it feels as though someone has drawn a thick, invisible curtain round the kitchen; even the kettle gives up with a defeated click that no one seems to register. The television in the front room still yammers away (canned laughter, a game‑show host’s barked patter) but it might as well be coming from another street. In here, sound has gone thin and high, the way it does in the seconds before a car hits something.
Eyes slide off Dominic as if he’s a too‑bright light, then guiltily drift back again. A cousin finds urgent business straightening cutlery on the crowded worktop; someone else rearranges paper plates on the table with surgical attention. A few people stare down into their drinks as though the dregs might offer guidance. Expressions hang midway between reactions, muscles caught in the act: mouths just short of pursed, brows half‑creased. Offence stands side by side with hurt, both trying to pull rank. One aunt’s lips blanch into a hard line; another’s eyes shine wetly, though whether with anger or woundedness is not yet clear. Across the doorway, Will’s jaw jerks, as if he’s chewing an argument he hasn’t dared to swallow.
Reactions begin in shoulders rather than tongues. The room seems to hunch in unison: shrugs that are not quite shrugs, backs stiffening, arms folding with a quiet rash of rustles and the creak of worn cotton. Someone’s fingers worry the edge of a paper napkin to a pulp. Sebastian, leaning by the archway, smooths his sleeve with unnecessary precision, his polite smile frozen into something almost porcelain. The air thickens, grease and steam congealing into a sort of domestic fog in which nobody can find the first safe word.
The ordinary household sounds that resume, the faint tick of the hot oven, the distant rattle of the letterbox in the wind, the toddler’s resumed whimpering in the hall, only underline how carefully everyone is not speaking. Jaws set, eyes narrow, and you can almost see people reaching for whichever armour comes quickest: a joke, a change of subject, or a story about someone else’s disaster. No one wants to be the first to step back into the open, to acknowledge that something weighty and unseemly has just been laid squarely on the lino between the fridge and the table. For a breathless stretch of seconds, the whole room hangs there, balanced between apology and escalation, with Dominic left standing as the single, offending fact everyone now has to arrange themselves around.
He lifts one shoulder in a rueful half‑shrug, as if to take some of the sting out of Dominic’s words rather than to contradict them. “It’s…a lot,” he says, choosing each syllable as though aware they might be weighed for offence. “Having everyone so sure what you’re meant to want. Business, house, family, whatever it is this week. Like they’ve written the ending already and you’re only there to fill in the middle bit.”
A couple of people blink, as if unsure whether he is agreeing with Dominic or gently rebuking him. Ryan lets the uncertainty sit; he does not glance towards the aunt who spoke, or towards Will, or Marnie. His attention stays anchored where Dominic is, one steady point in the overloaded room. “And if you don’t fit it,” he adds, a faint dry note under the softness, “then you’re ungrateful, or wasting your chances. Even when half of them would swap places with you if they could.”
He offers the smallest of smiles, neither matey nor patronising, just enough to make backing away from outright war look like an option rather than a climb‑down.
His voice stays low, pitched for the small radius between them rather than the whole crowd, and it slips into the brittle quiet without quite disturbing its surface. He does not, Dominic notices, presume to translate or soothe; instead he circles the thing obliquely, naming the drag of other people’s plans, the way it feels when they’ve already diagrammed your life on the back of an envelope then hand it to you as if it were a prize. Around the table, a few faces tilt, listening in spite of themselves. For a narrow moment the room seems to find, if not agreement, at least a shared outline of discomfort. The tension loosens by a notch, balanced uneasily between Dominic’s fury and Ryan’s offered language for it.
The laugh cracks the surface like a dropped glass. One of the aunties on the sagging sofa tips her mug vaguely in Ryan’s direction, tea slopping perilously near the rim. “Aye, but folk like you don’t really get it, do you, love?” she calls. “City professionals can just pack up when they’re bored. Different when you’re stuck here watching the bills breed.” She lets it land as if it were a joke, but the sharpened envy in her voice slices clean through the attempted humour, neatly filing Ryan with the people who leave rather than the ones who can’t.
A few relatives chuckle on reflex, nodding as if the joke has sorted something usefully. Others go still, eyes flicking between Ryan’s courteous half‑smile and Dominic’s still‑flushed face, recalculating allegiances. In the space of a breath Ryan is nudged across to Sebastian’s side of the invisible line (one of those who belong elsewhere, who choose Seabridge instead of being claimed by it) and the room’s unease begins, almost audibly, to swivel and reform around that fresh point of offence.
The uncle who first did the outing snorts, apparently pleased to find his instincts confirmed. “Parachute people,” he mutters, not nearly as low as he thinks. “Drop in, drop out, never see the winter damp.” The phrase hangs there, cheaply satisfying, until one of the cousins on the sofa, knees jiggling, phone balanced on a cushion, says, too fast and far too loud, “Yeah, well, we’d all be sunk without their bloody money anyway, wouldn’t we?”
Her words land with a clumsy smack, half‑truth and heresy together. A couple of heads whip round; someone tut‑laughs as if scolding a child for swearing in church. On the television, a canned audience whoops at something inoffensive, the tinny laughter bubbling up just as the real laughter dies. It sounds hysterical by comparison, a reminder from another world where problems resolve neatly between advert breaks.
Sebastian, by the doorway, seems to feel the room tilt towards him like iron filings towards a magnet. He performs a small adjustment of his body an advertisement for non‑threatening good breeding. His smile, when an older cousin glances his way, is modest, almost self‑deprecating, as if to intimate that any money that might inadvertently fall from his pockets would be terribly embarrassed to be mentioned.
Ryan, caught nearer the kitchen table, has less rehearsal for this sort of theatre. His fingers tighten imperceptibly around his mug, knuckles blanching above the chipped ceramic before he remembers to move, to sip, to nod as though he recognises a familiar joke about his own kind. The mug clinks very softly against his teeth. Dominic, watching from his post by the door, can see the fractional delay between impact and performance: the moment in which Ryan’s face is neither professional mask nor easy guest, but something rawer, irritated and hurt, before the mild, agreeable expression slides back into place.
Dominic’s mum, cheeks high with the particular flush that meant she’d like everyone to stop immediately, clatters cups into the sink a little too hard. “Right,” she says, louder than the television, “tea’s on, whether you lot like each other or not.” It is meant as a joke, the kind that usually draws obliging laughter and a general shuffling towards détente. This time it lands with a muted thud. People do move, of course they do; tea is still the country’s last functioning emergency service, but they move in eddies rather than as one tide.
Hands reach past shoulders for mugs, careful not to brush. Murmured offers of sugar and milk sound like negotiations between minor states. The clusters that form are low and tight: aunties over by the sofa muttering in the shared language of long grievance; a knot of cousins near the TV, thumbs flicking on dead‑zone screens; older uncles rearranging themselves between doorway and table like a human barricade.
From his post by the kitchen door, Dominic feels glances catch on him and skid off again. People’s faces adjust minutely as their eyes reach him: a cousin’s polite half‑smile that doesn’t quite commit, an aunt’s faint frown smoothing itself away. It is as if, having just drawn a bright chalk line between “locals” and “blow‑ins,” the room has remembered that Dominic stands inconveniently with one foot on either side.
He can almost hear the mental arithmetic as they look: how long he’s been gone, what he’s come back with, whether his anger a moment ago sounded like defence of the town or contempt for it. To some he is still the lad from Langley Street with oil under his nails; to others, already halfway filed with Marnie and Will and the rest who “went off.” The knowledge that they are, collectively, trying to place him, asset or traitor, ours or theirs, sits hot at the back of his neck, prickling.
Will, pinned between the table and the human barricade of uncles, edges toward Ryan with a matey little sideways shuffle that fools nobody. “So, how’s… work things? In your line,” he says, making “line” do the heavy lifting of not saying banks, not saying loans, not saying I am drowning, throw me something.
Ryan obliges with a few careful sentences about “busy but steady,” about clients “tightening belts,” each phrase sanded smooth to avoid sounding like he is auditing the room. Will nods too fast, eyes darting involuntarily to Sebastian’s watch, the neat fall of Sebastian’s jumper, the unconscious entitlement with which he leans against a doorframe he doesn’t own.
Every equivocation from Ryan makes Will’s skin crawl; every bland reassurance feeds the frantic abacus in his head, flicking through plans that all seem, unhelpfully, to rely on men who can get back in their cars and drive away.
On the sofa’s edge, Marnie laughs a notch too brightly at some throwaway remark about “clever girls in the big city,” only for the sound to die as the conversation slews, with dreary inevitability, back to “proper jobs” and “making something of yourself.” Faces lift, turn toward her almost automatically, like plants towards light, and then swivel to Sebastian beside her, their presence silently conscripted as Exhibit A for what “getting out” is supposed to look like. Sebastian’s smile acquires an extra layer of polish; he straightens a cuff as if his jumper, not his class, has just been inspected.
Across the room, Lena, half‑perched on an arm of the sagging sofa, notebook still peeking from her open bag like contraband, watches the tiny shifts: who leans in, who leans away, who laughs a shade too hard at jokes about “London types.” She files it all, reflexively, under living case study, even as a small, guilty part of her recognises the angle of their bodies towards her too, the way she has, however gently, been nudged into the same elsewhere category she is busy analysing.
The rain drums harder against the thin windows, sealing the house like a pressure cooker; the usual release valve of someone “popping out for a smoke” or “checking the kids in the yard” is gone. With nowhere to scatter, the room’s stories must stay and jostle: Will’s glossed‑over debts, Dominic’s half‑truths about Birmingham, Sebastian’s curated politeness, Ryan’s careful neutrality, Marnie’s unspoken exit plan. Questions begin to circle her more insistently (where she’s based now, how long she’s really planning to stay in Seabridge this time, whether “abroad” is still just a joke) and each enquiry is sweetened with a smile and sharpened with curiosity. The collective sense of waiting for someone, anyone, to say the next irreversible thing settles across the table like a second tablecloth, heavy and stain‑proof.
The questions had teeth now. The earlier teasing lilt had gone; what was left sounded like cross‑examination.
“So is it London or what, love?” called Aunt Jan from by the oven, her hand still plunged in a tray of roast potatoes as if geography could be settled between bastes.
“You can do your job from here these days, can’t you?” someone else put in: one of the cousins by marriage, laptop permanent, who had once explained “remote working” to the room as though he’d invented the internet.
“You’re not daft enough to go to the States, are you? They’ll shoot you for crossing the road over there,” Uncle Kev announced, to a murmur of agreement and an eye‑roll from the younger contingent.
The air thickened with steam and opinions. Questions overlapped, ricocheting off the tiles. “Why would you leave when you’ve done so well?” “There’s agencies in Newcastle, pet.” “You don’t even like hot weather.” “What about your mam?” The word “mam” hit harder than the rest; Dominic saw Marnie flinch.
She was still half‑standing in the kitchen doorway, one hip braced against the frame as if she might bolt back into the hall at any moment. The tea towel in her hands had been twisted into a rope, fingers working it tighter with every fresh inquiry. Her laugh, when it came, was clean wrong. Too high, too bright, like a note forced out of an instrument not quite in tune.
“Alright, alright,” she said, cutting across the chorus. “I’ll just… say it, then.”
Dominic felt the room lean in without moving. Even the kettle, mid‑boil, seemed to hesitate. Somewhere behind him a chair scraped; Sebastian, no doubt, adjusting into a better listening position. Will’s phone screen lit his face an anxious blue, but he didn’t dare look down.
Marnie’s gaze flicked round the kitchen, over aunties with folded arms, uncles with raised brows, cousins pretending not to stare, and then skated past Dominic as though his eyes would be the thing that undid her. The tea towel hung from her fingers like a white flag she hadn’t decided whether to wave.
She lays the tea towel down on the worktop with care, as if it might later be produced for the jury, and unspools herself from the doorframe, shoulders squaring by degrees. “It’s not London,” she says, and Dominic notices she doesn’t look at anyone, just somewhere over his left shoulder, as if the far wall is less dangerous than faces. “It’s… Lisbon.”
The name lands wrong in the Harlow kitchen, too bright a syllable for a room that smells of Bisto and chip‑fat. It might as well be the moon. Dominic feels, absurdly, as if a draught has slipped in under the back door.
“Five‑year contract,” Marnie goes on, words brisk now, like she’s reading off a spec sheet. “Visa, relocation package, the whole thing basically sorted. Flat arranged. They want an answer by the end of the week.” Her fingers press little crescents into the edge of the counter, knuckles whitening on each enumerated benefit. Around her, the fridge hums, the roast potatoes spit, and the word “Lisbon” just hangs there, foreign and glossy, like something the tide’s washed up that doesn’t belong.
For a second, nobody moves. Then sound arrives all at once: a chair scrapes, cutlery rattles, someone near the sink lets out a low, unbelieving “Christ.” The kettle clicks itself off, ignored.
“Five years?” her mum says, not quite asking, not quite believing, the word “five” laid out flat as lino.
An aunt claps a hand to her chest and crows, too loudly, “That’s bloody brilliant, our Marnie going international!” as if volume might make it uncomplicated.
By the draining board, plates are stacked with just a shade too much force. “Course she is,” comes a mutter, sharp as broken crockery. “Always got one eye on somewhere better, that one.” A few heads turn; nobody quite risks agreeing out loud.
The steam off the pans and the chip‑shop vinegar hanging in the air seem to congeal, and “abroad” stops being a joke destination and turns into furniture, as solid and immovable as the table between them. All the easy lines about “getting it out of your system” die before anyone can fish them up. In the brief, scalded quiet, Dominic feels the old family myth of Marnie (off having adventures but fundamentally theirs, on elastic) curl black at the edges and go.
Across the room, cousins trade looks like cards: some faces openly dazzled, others pinched, as if her leaving confirms something they were half‑afraid to admit about the town, about what staying means. Dominic feels the floor tip a fraction: not at the thought of her sunning herself elsewhere, but at the steel in her tone. Even Sebastian, stationed neatly by the doorway with his glass paused mid‑air, blinks once, twice, the faintest hesitation in a man who usually treats revelations as after‑dinner entertainment. In that narrow, breathless moment, everyone in the kitchen seems to grasp that this isn’t another of Marnie’s charming interludes before she drifts back. This is her stepping cleanly off their shared map and choosing a whole other life.
For a long breath, nobody speaks. Even the boiler seems to hold off its usual clank. Then Sebastian’s smile returns, fractionally brighter, teeth a shade more on display, as if someone has cued a spotlight. His shoulders square by a millimetre; Dominic recognises the move from blokes about to charm a difficult customer.
“Well,” Sebastian says lightly, giving the dregs of his drink a slow, theatrical swirl, “this does make my chats with Chambers & Co. feel a touch…premature.”
The name lands with a soft, heavy thud. Not the local solicitors over the bookies, then. London, money, the kind of people whose surnames mean something on headed paper. A ripple goes round the room: barely visible, but Dominic feels it in the way Aunt Carol’s eyes narrow and Will’s phone‑hand freezes mid‑scroll.
Sebastian lets the silence acknowledge it for him. Of course he’s on first‑name terms with some firm in the capital; of course these conversations happen in his world, over wine that doesn’t come in a two‑litre bottle and billable hours that would pay a month’s rent here.
“It was all very informal, naturally,” he adds, in a tone that suggests nothing in his life has ever been less than impeccably formal. “But one doesn’t raise these possibilities without a degree of seriousness on all sides.”
Dominic hears the “one” and has to stop himself snorting. Marnie’s shoulders draw up a fraction, as if she’s bracing for an impact no one else can quite see. Nobody rushes to fill the gap. Even the TV from the front room seems to have gone down a volume, the canned laughter far away.
Sebastian’s glass catches the weak kitchen light as he tilts it, admiring the thin amber smear like it’s helped him through worse scenes than this. The smile stays, pinned delicately in place, but his jaw tightens once, a tiny pulse at the temple, and Dominic realises this isn’t just some decorative man she’s brought along to be admired. This is someone who has, in his own mind at least, already been rearranging his life around her. And has just discovered he was the only one who thought they were on the same plan.
He doesn’t look at Marnie when he goes on, but a fraction to the left of her shoulder, as if what he’s saying belongs on a wall behind her rather than to her face. “I’d sounded out a couple of partners about shifting more of my work north. Schools, housing, commute to my place…” Each item is laid down with the calm efficiency of someone reading from prepared notes, not confessing anything messy or human.
Dominic watches the list unfurl like bullet points on a slide: discreet inquiries over lunches that cost more than anyone here’s weekly shop; estate agents who talk about “good stock” instead of “damp”; league tables and catchment areas instead of whether the comp’s still on special measures. Around Sebastian, chairs creak and cutlery stills, hands hovering a safe inch above plates. Even the kids look up, animal‑pricked, sensing weather.
It isn’t just that he’d thought about it. He’d mapped it: their town rendered as a lifestyle option, a column of pros and cons in a world where you can simply decide to come north, like changing trains.
“I assumed,” Sebastian adds, the word coming out clipped and oddly fragile, “that was where we were headed.”
The assumed sits between them like a misplaced piece of furniture, forcing everyone to step round it. It isn’t shouted, but it might as well be; an accusation wrapped in grammar, addressed not just to Marnie but to every person in the room who has ever coasted on implication and charm. In that single syllable he recasts himself: not the sleek ornament at her side, but a man who has been quietly re‑tiling the floor of a very cushioned existence on the basis of a future he thought they were jointly drafting. Dominic feels the shift: from decorative plus‑one to jilted planner, blindsided in public.
The kitchen seems to pivot towards Marnie. Colour climbs to her cheekbones, bright against the careful make‑up; the hostess sheen slips. “I didn’t… we never agreed anything,” she manages, the words emerging thinner than her usual patter. “You talked about options, Seb. I just didn’t, I never said yes.” Under the family’s collective stare it sounds paltry, a semantic fig‑leaf where he’d built a future.
A noise passes round the table, not quite sympathy and not quite glee: an aunt’s low “oh, love,” a cousin’s sharp little snort, someone sucking their teeth. The shine on Marnie and Sebastian dulls in real time, revealing grubby fingerprints underneath. Sebastian’s jaw flickers once; Marnie’s laugh, when she finds it, comes out thin and tinny. Chairs scuff; people look elsewhere and then very deliberately back. If that pedestal can crack, others might too. A cousin swivels towards Will with a grin two shades too bright, voice high with manufactured cheer, and asks when Sebastian’s famous investment is actually landing: because that’s all settled, isn’t it?
Uncle Kev’s “Go on then, when’s Seb’s money coming to rescue you?” lands with an edge it didn’t quite have in the rehearsal versions over lunch. People laugh, but it’s the wrong sort of laugh: too quick, too loud, like they’re all a bit relieved to have a fresh target. Half the table look at Will; the other half measure Sebastian’s profile as if they might be able to see a direct debit form written along his jawline.
Sebastian produces a small, perfectly social smile, the sort you could frame and sell in Waitrose along with the cheese. It is, Dominic notes, entirely free of content. No nod, no “of course,” no lazy “we’ll see.” Just a polite curve of the mouth and the slightest lowering of his lashes, as though the question refers to some charming shared joke from a world where money is never actually discussed.
The absence of denial feels, perversely, like its own statement. If there really was a deal, wouldn’t he want the credit? Instead there’s that faintly amused reserve, as if the whole notion of him swooping in to bankroll a Langley Street garage is an entertaining fiction he’s indulgent enough not to contradict.
Will barks a laugh that’s half a beat late. “Well, you know, these things take time,” he says, hitching his shoulders, phone still in his hand like a prop. “We’re just… lining things up, aren’t we, Seb?” He throws the name across the table like a life‑ring, all forced mateyness.
Sebastian merely inclines his head, neither catching it nor letting it sink. An elegant non‑answer that leaves Will’s sentence hanging in the steam above the casserole. The silence that follows isn’t real silence, not in this house; cutlery scrapes, someone coughs, a chair creaks. But underneath, Dominic can feel something recalibrating, tiny mental abacuses clicking as people add up what was said, what wasn’t, and who’s suddenly not as underwritten as he’d liked to appear.
Will leans forward, grin already in place, words spilling out on cue. “Yeah, yeah, we’ve been talking, it’s all in motion, you know how these things are, few i’s to dot, t’s to cross, ”
“Like that ‘instant’ transfer for Mam’s boiler?” calls Kerry from the far end, not loudly, but neatly enough that it clips straight through his spiel. “Three weeks ago, that was. Still waiting.”
A little ripple goes round the table, sharper than the earlier laughter. Someone chuckles; someone else doesn’t. Will’s grin holds, but it looks strained now, teeth instead of warmth.
“That’ll be the bank,” he says too quickly. “You know what they’re like, ”
“Bank didn’t stop you sending the invoice,” another cousin puts in, not looking up from their plate. “Just stopped you paying the lads, did it?”
There’s a low murmur from the middle seats: mention of texts unanswered, a job half‑finished “’cause there was a cashflow thing,” an aunt saying she’s had to chase twice. Jokes that had been scattered, individual pinpricks, begin to arrange themselves; you can feel the lines joining up. The room’s attention tightens, lazy amusement hardening into scrutiny.
Will’s thumbs hover, then still, the performance muscle finally failing him. The screen flares and dims, little banners stacking up at the top, REMINDER, PAYMENT DUE, unknown numbers that are probably not, as he would say, “opportunities.” He doesn’t open any of them. Instead he blinks at the glass as if it might, with sufficient will, display a signed term sheet.
“What stage is it at, then?” someone asks. “When do the funds clear? Is the garage even signed for?” Each question is perfectly ordinary; together they work like solvent, lifting off the sheen. Will reaches for buzzwords, pipeline, commitments, strategic interest, and for elastic phrases about quarters and projections. The more he talks circles, the clearer the empty middle of them becomes.
Eventually the patter dies on his tongue. Will’s gaze drops to the stained tablecloth, jaw working, thumb smearing at a fleck of gravy as if he could rub out the questions with it. When he speaks again, the bounce has bled from his voice. Haltingly, he concedes there’s no agreement with Sebastian. No papers, no dates, not even a proper meeting. Just “really positive chats,” a pitch deck he keeps “refining,” and a logo mocked up on his phone. The gleaming new garage, it turns out, lives mostly in his head and in a handful of hopeful spreadsheets that never quite add up.
Under a patter of questions that grow less jokey and more forensic, he starts downgrading his own adjectives. First it’s “a bit stretched,” then “short‑term tight,” then, under his aunt’s steady, unimpressed stare, the truth: “basically juggling to keep things going.” The room stills, the recalculation almost audible, as the golden hustler shrinks into a man sprinting on a treadmill that barely moves.
His dad exhales a bitter laugh that cuts across the quiet, a short, rasping sound that seems to snag on the wallpaper. “All of you with your schemes,” he says, voice rough from cigarettes and swallowed arguments. “Big plans, flashy talk… but when it all goes tits‑up, who’s actually left here to deal with it?”
He doesn’t bother dressing the question as hypothetical. His gaze goes first to Will, taking in the too‑new trainers and the useless phone face‑down on the table. Then it skids sideways and catches on Dominic like a hook, and for once Dominic wishes he’d kept his head down, made himself smaller than the chair.
“Sat in London, Leeds, whatever,” his dad mutters, “talking about projections and positions and what‑have‑you, while someone back here’s fighting off the bloody meter man.” A breath, sharp and derisive. “It’s always us left holding the baby when the clever ideas go wrong.”
Dominic feels the shape of the speech coming long before the words land; he knows the prelude, the way his dad’s thumb taps the knife handle, the tightening of his jaw. Old ground, worn smoother by repetition, but no less treacherous.
“’Cause we’ve been here before, haven’t we?” his dad says, the volume climbing with each syllable. “Lads talking big, making promises. Trouble starts, and off they go. Someone’s got to clear it up. Someone who doesn’t get to just… drive away.”
There’s a faint, embarrassed cough from the end of the table; a chair creaks. The air thickens with the smell of gravy and old grievances. Dominic’s mother shifts as if to change the subject, but she doesn’t get the chance. His dad’s stare has fixed now, unblinking, and Dominic can almost feel the next line reach for the past like a hand going to a familiar scar.
“We’ve been here before, haven’t we?” he goes on, words gathering speed as if they’ve been queuing for years. “Not just with daft business schemes, neither. Trouble with that lass, all that carry‑on. Police at the door, neighbours twitching curtains, your mother in tears.” He stabs the air with his fork, gravy flecking the tablecloth. “Dom losing his rag, slamming doors, smashing off in that rust bucket, leaving us to face the bloody music.”
The fork clatters to the plate, louder than it needs to be. “We were the ones left answering questions. Neighbours asking what he’d done this time, folk at the pub whispering like they knew better than us. Your mam having to pretend everything were fine so it didn’t get round the estate worse than it already had.”
He snorts, a wet, bitter sound. “And while all that was going on, bills still coming through the door, final notices, phone ringing with people wanting money, he was off God‑knows‑where, no address, no call, nothing. Just gone. Like the mess would tidy itself.”
Dominic’s jaw tightens; the muscle flickers once, betraying him. Across the table his mother says, “Alan,” under her breath, the word shaped more in exhale than voice, but his dad is rolling now, past any soft warning. “We picked up the pieces then, same as we always do,” he says, louder, eyes never leaving Dominic’s face. “While certain people”, a sharp jerk of the head, unnecessary but cruelly precise, “decide it’s easier to run than stay and sort the mess they’ve made. Smash off in a huff, leave the rest of us to do the explaining.”
A murmur goes round the table, not quite agreement, not quite protest. Dominic feels it like a draught, a tug between versions of him.
The blow doesn’t land quite as intended; it glances off Dominic and splinters sideways, catching on old, hairline cracks no one had named before. For the first time, a few faces register that his exit wasn’t just sulky drama but a detonation no one ever cleared up: only boxed, labelled “his fault,” and shelved, to be hauled down now as convenient ordnance.
Silence thickens, sticky as steam on the window. Chairs creak; cutlery is adjusted, not used. Even the kettle’s fretful burble in the kitchen sounds impertinent. It seeps through, the notion that half the family’s favourite anecdotes are really one‑sided indictments, polished and re‑aired as warnings. It isn’t only Will’s hustle in ruins now, Dominic thinks, but the pretence that time had laid any of this decently to rest.
Ryan clears his throat; it is a small sound, but in the packed, steaming room it goes off like cutlery dropped on a tiled floor. The easy warmth he has worn all evening slips, and when he speaks the charm has been folded away with professional care.
“I should probably… be transparent about something,” he says, hands laced on the table as though he’s on the safe side of a desk. “Some of the money Will’s been talking about (this hoped‑for investment) belongs to clients I already advise.”
The word clients lands with a faint metallic ring. Dominic can feel the air tilt, everyone recalibrating. Ryan goes on, slower now, as if accuracy might save him.
“They’re from up on the headland. A couple of the bigger houses there. They asked me, months back, to keep an ear out for… opportunities locally.”
He does not look at Sebastian when he says headland, but every eye in the room knows the direction of the wind. It only takes Sebastian’s stillness for the pieces to start arranging themselves. The low rustle that follows is not quite words, more the sound of people glancing at one another and deciding what story they have just been given.
Dominic feels it as a draught under the door, cold and familiar. Headland money. Clients. Opportunities locally. It is the old song in a new key: decisions about the town taken in lounges with sea views and better upholstery, then drifting down the hill dressed as luck.
Across the table, someone mutters, “Course it is,” under their breath; another relative snorts, a sharp little laugh that isn’t amused. Dominic watches Ryan instead. The man’s shoulders are set, jaw working once as if he is biting off the more convenient version of events. He looks tired, suddenly. Less like a smooth adviser dropping in for tea, more like someone who has realised he has walked into a family argument carrying a lit fuse and his own name on the label.
The questions come in a scatter at first, like hailstones, small, stinging, trying to sound like banter.
“So whose side are you on, then, Ryan?”
“Headland or harbour?”
“You lot up there pulling the strings again, are you?”
Laughter chases the words, but it is a brittle, serviceable sort; something to hide behind. Dominic can hear the edge beneath it, old and sore. Ryan doesn’t flinch, exactly, but there’s a faint tightening at the corners of his mouth, as if he has bitten down on something sour and is determined to swallow it politely.
“I’ve… been asked, discreetly, to sense‑check a few of Will’s pitches,” he says. The little pause before discreetly does him no favours. “On their behalf. To give an opinion. That’s all.”
The phrase sense‑check lands like jargon in a room that prefers things blunt. Someone at the far end mutters, “Sounds cosy,” and another, “Nice work if you can get it.” Ryan presses on, voice even.
“I never promised anything. To anyone. My job is to advise, not to steer what your family decides to do.”
He might as well have said conflict of interest aloud; the words rise, unsaid, like steam. In the narrow room Dominic can feel everyone suddenly seeing the shape of it: the same man smiling over tea here and spreadsheets there, the same proposals weighed in two different sets of scales. For a moment, it is as if Ryan himself is the hinge the town swings on: one hand in their world, the other in the lounges up on the cliff, and no way to keep both clean.
Sebastian’s eyebrows lift a fraction, a cool little tic of recognition, as if a ledger in his head has just balanced itself. Of course their worlds overlapped; how could they not? It is only the rest of the room that seems surprised. A couple of aunts shift in their seats, smoothing skirts that don’t need it. An uncle coughs into his fist and stares at his plate as though the peas might offer guidance. Others sit back with a grim, almost satisfied air, like jurors hearing the final piece of evidence that proves the case they have been arguing in pubs for years. For a heartbeat the distance between this narrow terrace and the high, glassy houses on the headland feels like an open wound laid bare on the oilcloth.
Through the mutter of cousins and the clink of cups, Dominic watches Ryan, not his words. He tracks the small betrayals of composure: the way Ryan’s gaze keeps returning to him after each careful clarification, as if testing Dominic’s face for damage reports. It isn’t the wary look of a man placating a client; it’s something rawer, almost apologetic, a softness that jars against the sleek professional patter and the tidy phrase clients up on the headland. It feels, treacherously, like concern for him in particular, as though Dominic’s opinion is the one variable Ryan cannot afford to miscalculate.
It is like the bulb above the table flares hotter, picking out the obvious he has been stubbornly misreading. Ryan has not spent the evening orbiting him for the sake of interest rates and engine bays; all those throwaway jokes, the quiet “you all right?”s at the kettle, the way his body angled instinctively towards Dominic in every crowded doorway, rearrange themselves as a different species of attention. The recognition thumps through Dominic’s chest at the precise instant the room decides Ryan is two‑faced, making the look that passes between them feel less like a glance and more like stepping, together, into a spotlight neither of them volunteered for but both somehow lit.
For a long, airless second, nobody moves. The only sounds are the radiator ticking and the faint slosh of the sea through the open window, the house breathing for them because no one else seems capable. Dominic is aware of his own pulse loud in his ears, of the glaze on the oilcloth beneath his forearms, of the way the steam from the mugs has cooled into a faint skin. Time doesn’t quite stop, but it does that strange elastic thing it used to do in the seconds before his dad’s temper went one way or another.
Above the table, he can almost see it. The usual labels hanging there like leftover condensation: coward, golden girl, chancer, posh ticket out, safe pair of hands. Words people have been using so long they stopped needing to say them. Only now they seem to have lost their hooks. They drift, searching for somewhere to latch on, and find nothing that matches properly any more.
Coward does not sit as neatly on him when half the room has just watched his father weaponise an old story to keep him in place. Golden girl looks ridiculous next to Marnie’s blotchy cheeks and the crack in her voice when she said “I can’t stay just to make you all feel better.” Chancer, pinned so cheerfully to Will’s chest, shows its threadbare side when you know there isn’t a safety net under the swagger. Posh ticket out starts to fray on Sebastian now his big reveal has turned out to be a private fantasy no one signed up for. Safe pair of hands slides askew on Ryan when it turns out those hands have been busy holding more strings than anyone realised.
Faces he’s known his whole life (plus the few he hasn’t) look oddly naked without the familiar scripts to slot them into. The small, fixed expressions they wear for one another, Marnie’s breezy grin, Will’s cocky half‑smile, his dad’s practised gruffness, are all a fraction off, like masks that haven’t been tied on properly. It strikes Dominic, with a flicker of something like vertigo, that for years they’ve all been acting in a play nobody remembers agreeing to be in. Now, with the backdrop ripped down and the props in splinters around their feet, not one of them seems to know what their next line is supposed to be.
One of the aunties opens her mouth, breath already shaped around some line about “more drama than EastEnders on a Sunday,” but whatever she sees in the faces around the table makes her swallow it back down. The half‑formed laugh turns into a cough and then into the busy clatter of her rearranging teaspoons that don’t need rearranging.
Across from Dominic, Will stares at a pale ring blooming on the oilcloth where someone’s mug was, his thumb moving over it in tight, compulsive circles. It has the look of a man trying to polish his way back to the earlier version of tonight, the one where he was the boy genius about to level up, not the lad who’s just admitted there’s nothing under the patter but overdrawn accounts and favours he can’t pay for. Each pass of his thumb seems to blur the edges a little further.
By the sink, Marnie’s hand has stilled on the teapot lid, fingers splayed, knuckles white against the brown ceramic. She looks as if she’s only just understood that saying it out loud (job, flights, a life that does not have this kitchen in it) has burnt clean through the prettier story everyone had been happy to hum along with. The familiar ritual of topping up cups has paused mid‑gesture, steam fading between her and the rest of them like the last of a curtain she’s accidentally set on fire.
Sebastian’s jaw is set too carefully, the mask of good manners stretched so taut that Dominic can see where it might split if anyone so much as breathed on it wrong. The room is clocking it too: not Sebastian the untouchable upgrade, the glossy proof that Marnie had traded up, but a man who has just discovered he is an optional extra in a life he thought he was co‑authoring. His importance has become, in an instant, something that can be haggled over rather than taken as read.
Even Ryan, who arrived wrapped in professional neutrality like a suit carrier over his real self, looks as if the floor plan has been redrawn under his feet. The revelation about his clients has taken Brasso to his halo, exposing what’s underneath as ordinary metal, serviceable, complicated, faintly tarnished, rather than the reassuring shine he thought he was providing. Dominic, watching the fine cracks spread across both of them, has the disorienting sense that the “proper blokes” he was meant to measure himself against are just as busy improvising their parts as the rest of them.
The old prickle of shame still flares at the back of his neck when “running away” loops in his head, but it meets a different weather this time. No easy chuckles, no solemn looks of agreement; just people’s eyes flicking, weighing, revising. The legend shows its seams. If that bit’s been stitched, he thinks, what else in this house is patchwork passed off as truth?
Those neat parts everyone had been playing, Marnie the cost‑free escape route, Will the local miracle, Sebastian the sensible upgrade, Dominic the object lesson, Ryan the benign professional, now dangle uselessly, like curling strips of old wallpaper. In the thin, reverberant silence, Dominic feels the room hesitate on a brink: if they go on sharing tea and oxygen, the scripts will have to be rewritten from scratch.
Dominic watched the migration of chairs with the faint, grim interest he usually reserved for time‑lapse videos of rust. Nobody said, “Right, let’s all move,” but they did: scraping, shuffling, the odd muttered “Shift up, love,” and suddenly the table looked wrong. The old formation, Marnie in the bright centre, relatives angled like petals round her, had a gap in it, and for once it wasn’t him making the awkward space.
She was at the cupboards, of all places, half‑turned away as she refilled the pot. Steam had fogged a crescent on the glass of the kitchen door. When she spoke, she aimed it at the lino, not the audience.
“I never said I’d come back,” she said. No lift at the end to soften it into a joke. “Not properly. I just… didn’t argue when everyone assumed.”
Someone coughed. An aunt clicked her tongue, but less in outrage than because she needed a noise to hang on to.
Marnie glanced up, met no one person’s eye, and added, “That’s on me. I liked being… useful, I suppose.” Her mouth twisted. “Proof it wasn’t a one‑way train out of here. But I can’t be that and have my own life. Not in the way you mean.”
It wasn’t a grand speech. If anything, it was oddly flat. Yet Dominic felt the room loosen round the edges, like someone had knocked a nail out of the wall and the family portrait had slipped a fraction. The younger cousins stopped their half‑whispered speculations about “when she moves back.” The older ones exchanged glances that said, silently, Ah. So that was only ever a story we told ourselves.
Across from him, Lena was being drawn into a new orbit. Two aunts, ones who’d never once asked Dominic what a timing belt was, were leaning towards her.
“Go on then, pet,” said Aunt Bev. “Tell us about your… what is it, communities?”
“Contemporary coastal communities,” Lena corrected gently, but without the usual lecture tone he remembered from school. “Which is a fancy way of saying places like this, really. How people live with change.”
“And they pay you for that?” another aunt asked, half teasing, half genuinely baffled.
Lena smiled, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and explained her work in terms of interviews over cups of tea, watching tides, listening. She made it sound less like escape to another world and more like circling back with better questions.
Marnie leaned on the counter, teapot forgotten, watching. When Lena laughed at something Bev said and the aunts beamed as if they’d said something clever rather than defensive, Marnie’s shoulders dropped a notch. Relief, Dominic thought, mixed with something that stung. Not envy, exactly. The pang of watching someone else fit the costume you’ve just wriggled out of.
He caught Marnie’s eye for a second. Her expression, stripped of performance, was startlingly ordinary. She lifted the teapot in a small, practical offering.
“Top‑up?” she asked him, like any cousin to any other, not the returning star to the prodigal disappointment.
“Aye,” he said. “Go on then.”
It wasn’t reconciliation. But it was, he realised, the first time in years she’d spoken to him as if neither of them were symbols of anything at all.
Conversation rose and fell around him in new, uncertain patterns. The old topics, house prices, who was “doing well,” jokes about “when you’re back for good, love”, seemed to have mislaid their footing. Twice, Dominic heard someone start on, “Of course, when Marn, ” and then stall, sentences juddering off into weather or the washing machine instead.
On his left, one of the younger cousins leaned in.
“So… you like it away, then?” Kyle asked, low enough not to carry. “Birmingham and that.”
Dominic shrugged. “It’s work. Same crap traffic, different accent.”
“But you reckon… you’d go again? If you were our age?”
The question was too straight to dodge with sarcasm. Dominic watched Lena field something earnest from Aunt Bev, watched Marnie pretend to fiddle with a cupboard hinge rather than listen to herself being gently replaced.
“Aye,” he said. “Or not. Just… don’t stay ’cause you’re scared, and don’t go ’cause you think it fixes everythin’. It doesn’t.”
Kyle nodded, chewing that over as if it were more useful than any of Will’s sleek pep talks.
Across the table, chairs scraped again as the next fault line shifted. Sebastian, who’d been a sort of ornamental centrepiece earlier, had drifted to the kitchen doorway. From there he could survey things without committing to them, like a man considering a property he had no real intention of buying.
He was still all please and thank you and “No, honestly, I’m fine here,” but the wattage had gone out. The cousins who’d clustered to hear about ski trips and internships in London began to peel off, drawn instead to Lena’s stories of fieldwork in towns with names they actually recognised. An uncle who’d been raving about “proper connections” now watched Sebastian’s averted profile and, Dominic thought, saw the truth of it: this one wasn’t staying for the winter.
Will, by contrast, had lost his little court altogether. The phone he’d kept flashing like a badge now lay face‑down by his plate, thumb resting on it as if on a pulse. When an older uncle dropped into the vacant chair beside him and said, not unkindly, “Right, lad. Start again. What d’you actually need?” Will didn’t grin, just swallowed and listened.
Dominic watched the small humiliation register: a fractional stiffening of shoulders, a polite laugh dialled down before it began. Sebastian recovered smoothly, of course, folding his hands around his glass, but he was no longer a prospect, just an anecdote people would one day tell about “that posh bloke Marn brought that time.” Even Ryan, hovering by the sink, drew more honest questions.
Sebastian tried again a few minutes later, easing a remark into a lull the way you might slide a card under a closed door.
“Of course, once they get the rail unions to see sense, half these delays will vanish,” he said lightly. “It’s just no one wants to blink first.”
On another afternoon, earlier in the day, Dominic could imagine that line provoking knowing chuckles, invitations for more anecdotes about “how it works in town.” Now it just felt like a line from the wrong script. The room had moved on.
A cousin at the far end murmured “Mm,” in the non‑committal way people did when they hadn’t quite caught something and weren’t inclined to ask. Someone clinked a teaspoon against a mug. The boiler clicked. The comment lay there, unclaimed, no one rude enough to contradict him, no one invested enough to follow his lead.
It was Lena who picked the thread up, but she turned it clean away from him.
“They’ve cut the seven‑fifteen bus,” she said, still looking at Dominic’s mother as she spoke. “So if you don’t drive, and you’ve got an early shift in town, you’re stuck. They’ve put on a later one, but it means you can’t get the kids to breakfast club.”
That, at least, landed. An aunt tutted. Somebody said, “Knew they’d do that.” School uniforms and zero‑hour contracts and who could give lifts on Tuesdays slid into the gap where Sebastian had tried to put commuter politics. The talk thickened into timetables, overtime, the cost of petrol, who was off sick at the depot again.
Sebastian’s smile didn’t falter, but his hands tightened a fraction around the stem of his glass. The problems on the table now were stubborn, local things: rusted hinges, not champagne corks. You couldn’t fix a cancelled bus with a trustee on a transport board any more than you could mend sea‑eaten foundations with a LinkedIn endorsement.
He was, Dominic thought, still exactly what he’d arrived as. But in a room suddenly preoccupied with who’d pick up whose kids if the late shift overran, that polish had all the practicality of a silk umbrella in a gale.
Dominic found himself drafted without ceremony. Someone shoved a biro into his hand, someone else sacrificed a paper napkin, and before he’d quite agreed he was leaning on his forearms at the narrow end of the table, sleeves shoved up, sketching a wobbly outline of an exhaust.
“Nah, look,” he said, marking a cross. “It’s this bracket that’s gone, not the whole pipe. Garage’ll quote you for the lot ‘cause it’s easier. Bit of welding here, fresh rubber hangers, you’re laughing.”
His uncle bent close, nodding like it was a sermon. Two younger cousins edged in, elbows on the table. Questions multiplied, practical and unembarrassed.
“What about mine, if it’s smoking on start‑up?”
“MOT’s end of the month, worth it or just scrap it?”
“Is it true they write stuff off now just ‘cause it’s old?”
The talk settled into a rough, fluent patter of miles per gallon, advisory notices, how long you could run a balding tyre without getting done. Sebastian and Ryan were near enough to hear, but not to steer; this was a register of lived shortage and bodged‑together fixes that had no role for an office, a board, or a friend in the City.
Ryan, picking up the shift like a change in weather, angled his body toward Will and softened his tone.
“Walk me through your runs a sec: who’s taking on the risk with those early drops? Just so you’re not carrying all the liability.”
He made it sound like concern over a pint, not a preliminary to a retainer, but the room had started to hear the small print in his vowels. Will opened his mouth, half‑relieved, half‑cornered.
Before he could answer, Aunt Deb cut clean across.
“Not everything needs paperwork and meetings, love. Sometimes the lad just needs a night’s sleep and a hot meal.”
She smiled when she said it, but it wasn’t a joke. Heads turned. Dominic felt the recalibration: Ryan wasn’t the grown‑up in the room any more, just another outsider tool to be picked up, or not, when it suited them.
Will’s graft is re‑narrated in real time. An uncle who once rolled his eyes at “all that online nonsense” recounts seeing Will unloading boxes in the rain at six in the morning, no employees in sight. Another chimes in with a memory of him helping carry fridges up the narrow stairs when the neighbour’s place flooded, no cameras, no pitch. A third adds the hours he spent sat in his van outside the depot “just in case a slot came up.” The punchlines that used to follow (about his flash trainers or daft schemes) don’t come. Instead, someone observes that “at least he’s knackered from trying, not from doing nowt,” and the line lands with a murmur of agreement that folds his missteps into a shared ethic rather than an individual failing, a lad overreaching maybe, but still one of theirs.
Dominic’s steadiness is folded into legend almost in passing. Someone recalls him under Nan’s sink with a torch before the plumber even rang back; another swears he never once took petrol money for dragging half the street home from the pub. Each anecdote lands lightly but reorders the ledger, shifting credit from polish to graft. When somebody mutters that “posh lad’s hands are softer than Nan’s trifle,” the laughter is friendly but final; the room’s idea of whose value counts has edged, almost imperceptibly, toward the ones who actually fix things.
The practical verdict on Will doesn’t end with lecture; it’s itemised, almost like they’re sorting out a leaky roof rather than a collapsing persona. His dad, who has never had an email address in his life, clears his throat.
“Right. Monday. You bring your laptop round ours. I want logins. All of ’em. Bank, PayPal, them… thingies.”
“Gateways,” Will mutters.
“Aye. Those. We’ll see what’s what properly.”
He says “we” like he’s talking about uncles and spanners, not algorithms and debt, but nobody laughs. The older cousin who does the books for half the street raises a hand.
“I’ll pop round after my shift. We’ll go through your cashflow. At the kitchen table, mind, not that gleaming co‑working space in your head.”
A ripple goes through the room: half amusement, half relief at the practicalness of it. Will starts to bristle, shoulders coming up.
“I can’t have everyone poking at my accounts, I’m not a kid, I just need a bit of, it feels like you’re smothering, ”
His mother, who has been quiet, wipes her hands on a tea towel and doesn’t look up.
“You’re not a lad with a paper round anymore, William. If you’re old enough to risk other people’s money, you’re old enough to let them see the numbers first.”
The silence that follows isn’t punitive. Nobody piles on. There are a few nods, a muttered “about time,” someone sucking their teeth like this is overdue dental work rather than moral reckoning. Dominic, watching, feels the line being drawn: not banishment, but terms.
Then the moment softens, as it always does.
“You still making Nan’s windows on Tuesday, love?” Aunt Deb calls from the doorway.
Will blinks.
“Yeah. Course.”
“Good. You can tell your dad which buttons to press on that laptop after,” someone adds, and the laughter that follows folds the new conditions into something older and sturdier: your hustle’s a family project now, not a solo performance.
The phone keeps buzzing on the sideboard like a trapped bluebottle. Each rattle against the varnish makes Will twitch, muscle memory sending his hand halfway out before his dad’s eyebrow lifts a fraction. This time, Will lets it shiver itself quiet, jaw working.
“Stick it in biscuit tin with the scratchies,” pipes up one of the teenagers from the doorway. “So he can’t do any more damage.”
There’s a beat, then a peel of laughter that isn’t cruel, just relieved. Someone actually fetches the battered tin from the top of the fridge, roses on the lid worn to ghosts. Will smirks, plays it up like it’s a forfeit at a stag do, drops the phone in with an exaggerated sigh as the cousins clap the lid shut.
“Ten minutes,” he warns.
They forget to give it back.
Ten minutes stretch into half an hour of him pinned to the chair by questions that, for once, aren’t invitations to brag. How bad is it, really? Who else is owed? What happens if the supplier walks? He answers without slides, without “scaling” or “phase two,” words sloughing off until what’s left is tired facts and a quiet, shaken sort of honesty. The room adjusts around him, curiosity replacing suspicion. By the time somebody remembers the tin, Will is halfway through explaining interest rates to Nan, and no one looks at him like he’s a bomb anymore. Just a daft lad who flew too close to the sun and is still, unmistakably, theirs.
Dominic’s own reckoning unfolds wordlessly at first, in the small, habitual mercies that always survived the rows. The tea appears at his elbow, strong and sweet the way he’s never actually asked for but always gets. A plate of leftovers materialises and his mother’s hand lands, just for a second, on the back of his neck as she reaches past for the salt. The touch is brief, impersonal on the surface, but it burns.
No one demands an apology. No one recites his sins.
Instead, the uncle who’d once called him ungrateful slumps into the chair beside him and, without meeting his eye, mutters that “it were easier being mad at you than admitting we were scared you’d not come back at all. Ever.”
Dominic lets the words sit between them, heavy as cutlery, staring at the gravy congealing on his plate. He hears the fear under the gruffness, hears his own in it too. Something unclenches; the old narrative of him as the boy who abandoned them shifts, just a fraction, toward the man they’d quietly been braced to lose and then, impossibly, got back.
The talk frays out in crooked lines rather than a grand summit. An aunt remarks that “everyone does a runner in their head sometimes,” flicking a hand towards the dark sea, and another relative shrugs that she once got as far as pricing studios in London before losing her nerve. The confession doesn’t excuse Dominic’s explosions, but it downgrades them from singular betrayal to one variant of a common pressure valve. Later, at the sink with sleeves rolled up, a younger cousin asks what it was actually like “out there”. Not starry‑eyed, but blunt about rent, split shifts, getting sacked, being skint and lonely. Dominic’s answer is halting, stripped of glamour, oddly careful. In the retelling, his outburst stops being a final verdict and settles into the opening chapter of a cautionary‑and‑aspirational family story instead.
Around the table, the redistribution of blame and grace begins to feel almost procedural, like chores finally written on the back of an envelope. Will is assigned spreadsheets and second opinions instead of blind cheques; Dominic, in an inversion of his teenage role, is asked whether he might look over Will’s van “just to be sure it’s worth chucking any money at.” The same uncle who confessed to misjudging him frames it half as a favour, half as a test of shared responsibility, making a joke about “proper adults” that doesn’t quite land and isn’t meant to. In accepting, Dominic isn’t just patching metal: he’s tacitly agreeing to stay in the circuitry of family decisions, to be rung when things grind or rattle instead of only when they explode. These new arrangements, supervised risk for Will, trusted competence for Dominic, lay the groundwork for later, quieter reconciliations and for decisions about who gets to invest in themselves without abandoning the rest, not as martyrs or black sheep, but as fallible shareholders in a common, weather‑beaten venture.
The “MOT and boiler” pact turns out not to be a one‑off, but the opening move in a quiet re‑drafting of what everyone owes whom. Once it’s been established that Dominic can be asked for competence rather than contrition, other people start edging their old habits into new shapes, testing whether the room will hold.
The aunt who used to slip Will cash in the hallway with a martyred sigh and a lecture about “believing in yourself” produces, instead, a folder from her handbag. She taps the corner of a half‑filled loan form and says, almost briskly, that she’ll look over “the boring bits” if he brings her proper numbers instead of promises. It’s presented as a favour to her (“I can’t bear bad punctuation, love”) but everyone hears the condition: help in kind, not bottomless overdraft.
A cousin who once treated Dominic as an on‑call taxi, phoning at midnight from the next town over, leans against the kitchen counter and mentions, almost off‑hand, that there’s a box room going spare in his flat “near the ring road, dead handy for the industrial estate” if Dominic ever wants a base for temp work. He phrases it like he’s doing Dom a deal, not begging for another ride, and Dominic recognises the difference. The offer sits between them, not as a trapdoor back into escape, but as a possible corridor that doesn’t require vanishing.
Elsewhere, smaller trades are struck. A niece volunteers to set up their dad’s online bill payments if he’ll finally teach her how to change a tyre. Someone’s promised lasagne in exchange for boiler‑bleeding lessons; another relative swaps childcare for help filling in a benefits form. No one calls these reparations or policies, but the pattern is evident: favours now come with edges and purposes, not as open‑ended tithes to the most chaotic or the loudest. The vague, guilty sense of lifelong obligation begins, almost imperceptibly, to crystallise into a series of finite, negotiable tasks: an economy of care that, for once, doesn’t run entirely on debt.
Marnie, having stepped down from her informal emcee post, drifts toward the kitchen doorway where Lena and Dominic are half‑trapped by the kettle and an overfull draining board. She doesn’t clang a spoon for attention or re‑frame the topic for the table at large; she just folds herself into the narrow gap beside them, hip against the counter, mug in hand.
Instead of orchestrating, she simply joins their conversation, listening more than steering as Lena outlines a research project on coastal trades. Who’s hanging on, who’s pivoting to tourism, whose skills are being written off as “nostalgia” until a storm knocks the power out. Dominic, after a sceptical snort about being turned into “data”, finds himself correcting her on which yards are still going, which back‑street units have the right pits and access, what a viable local garage would actually need in terms of equipment, insurance, and not getting undercut by mates with a jack and a driveway.
They find, to their mild shared surprise, that they can argue specifics without flinching from each other’s pasts: not as legend, observer, and exile, but as adults with overlapping stakes in the same place, sketching a version of Seabridge that might yet include all three of them.
Sebastian, catching fragments of that conversation, makes a deliberate choice not to insert himself with offers of contacts or capital. He knows exactly how he could: a cousin’s fund in Newcastle, a bored school friend on a regeneration board, a tasteful remark about enterprise zones. Instead, he stays in the background, answering polite questions about the headland estate when asked but letting his earlier authority leak away like heat from an open door. Without the scaffolding of being Marnie’s “serious prospect”, he is merely a guest with a good watch and the wrong postcode.
A few relatives notice the restraint and quietly file it under “not ours”; others, clocking the vacuum he leaves, begin to angle toward people who actually live and work in Seabridge rather than orbit it from above.
Ryan ends up drawn into a tight huddle at the table’s far end, where Will, Dominic and an older uncle are carving rough figures into the back of a takeaway menu, biro snagging on grease. With his earlier split loyalties now openly acknowledged, he places himself with surgical care: not a white‑knight investor, but an interpreter between bank jargon and back‑street graft. He runs through caps, exit clauses, cooling‑off periods, what “no personal guarantees” truly entails, and how to spot a poison‑pill interest rate, insisting, almost to his own surprise, that anything involving him will be written down, in full sentences, before a single pound or promise moves.
From these improvised conferences, something resembling a constitution shakes itself out. Will will lay his figures before a small “family panel” before any cash so much as twitches; Dominic gets first refusal on any scheme that wants his labour or his name on it; Ryan will translate everything into plain English, signatures and all. The atmosphere loosens by degrees as people grasp that future drama might be structured rather than blundered into; shoulders drop, glasses are refilled, and in that slackening of vigilance the first tentative jokes begin to land, turning wary negotiation into the kind of shared, self‑mocking story they can all live with.
The joking mood begins almost by accident, in the sweltering bottleneck of the galley kitchen, where steam from the kettle fogs the window and everyone is half in someone else’s way. An aunt, elbow‑deep in washing up, mutters that what they really need is “one of them big office whiteboards, like on the telly, just to keep track who’s storming off where next.”
Will, who has been hovering with the wary air of someone expecting another telling‑off, seizes on it like a lifeline. “Hang on,” he says, voice still rough round the edges, and rummages by the fridge. He comes up with a long‑suffering dry‑wipe marker and the surviving blank corner of a takeaway menu, already translucent with old grease.
“Right,” he announces, plonking it on the table between the biscuit tin and a tub of coleslaw. “Family workflow.”
He draws a lopsided box. “Step one: Get Idea.” An arrow. “Step two: Ignore Advice.” Another arrow, thicker. “Step three: Mild Disaster.” He glances at Dominic, the corners of his mouth twitching. “Step four: Emergency Family Summit.” He adds a wonky circle of stick‑figures around a teapot. Finally, with a flourish, “Step five: Cuppa.”
It gets a snort from the uncle at the head of the table, then a proper laugh from somewhere by the sink. Shoulders tilt toward the menu. Someone leans over and adds a branching box: “Secret Job Offer (Do Not Discuss).” Another cousin, in different handwriting, squeezes in “Mystery Investor???”, with three increasingly panicked question marks. A younger cousin, perched on the washing machine, contributes “Dramatic Exit to Harbour Wall” and, under protest, “Sulky Drive to Tesco Car Park.”
Lena, pen briefly borrowed, inserts a neat diamond: “Learn Lesson? Y/N,” with the arrow for “No” looping cheerfully back to “Get Idea.” Even one of the older aunties, who has spent the evening sighing into her pinny, takes the marker to add “Phone Your Mother” between “Mild Disaster” and “Family Summit.”
By the time the menu is blotted with ink and fingerprints, it has turned into an absurd cartography of the night: everyone’s routes through pride, secrecy and theatrics plotted in biro. The room’s laughter builds not on any one person’s humiliation, but on the dawning recognition that they have all, in their various costumes, been trudging round the same ridiculous circuit. What had, an hour ago, felt like singular catastrophe now looks suspiciously like a family tradition.
The menu‑graph migrates with them into the front room, propped ceremoniously against the biscuit tin like a referendum nobody quite remembers calling. An uncle peers at it over his glasses, lips moving as he reads. “You’re missing a category,” he announces. “Most Overrated Drama.”
There’s a brief hush while everyone silently compiles a shortlist.
Marnie, who has drifted to the edge of the cluster instead of holding court in the centre, lifts her hand with exaggerated meekness. “I’d like to nominate myself, Chair,” she says, and reaches for the marker when it’s offered. She sketches a stick‑figure with wild hair and a suitcase, adding a speech bubble: I’m definitely leaving… eventually.
It gets a laugh that’s warm rather than sharp. By pitching herself as exhibit A, she drains poison from the earlier reveal; the joke lands on the pattern, not on her alone. A couple of aunties tut affectionately instead of interrogating.
Dominic, watching from a half‑lean against the doorframe, feels the corner of his mouth twitch. Marnie glances up, catches his eye, and pulls a face that says, Well, that’s us told. Their answering grin is the first of the evening that isn’t a contest: just two old co‑conspirators recognising the same daft script they’ve both been reading from for years.
From the sofa, Lena watches the annotations multiply, arrows looping, names scribbled in, question marks clustering over “Happy Ending?”, until the whole menu looks less like a plan and more like an archaeological dig of everyone’s worst habits. She finally chimes in, pushing her glasses up with an ink‑stained knuckle. They’re not just drawing a flowchart, she declares; they’re drafting “The Official Seabridge Life Skills Curriculum.” In a mock‑serious seminar voice, she starts reading modules off the page: “Unit One: Advanced Sulking; Unit Two: Tactical Job Announcements; Unit Three: Beginner’s Banter with Toffs.” When Sebastian’s name gets pencilled beside that last one, she lets the beat hang, then glances his way. He responds with a small, theatrical bow that earns hoots and a couple of admiring wolf‑whistles rather than resentment. Dominic, watching the exchange, notes how even Sebastian looks more like a bloke caught in the net than some untouchable prize catch. The academic in Lena is quietly pleased: by turning their prickly little status wars into course material, the room is, without quite meaning to, rewriting its own syllabus.
The joke list snowballs into an awards ceremony as more relatives pile in from the hallway, drawn by laughter and the promise of cake. Someone rummages in the sideboard and triumphantly produces an old plastic trophy from a long‑forgotten darts night, slapping a strip of masking tape over the plaque so they can relabel it “Lifetime Achievement in Carry‑On.” Nominations fly like heckles: an aunt for “Most Creative Budgeting,” Will for “Best Unintentional Cliffhanger,” Dominic for “Outstanding Contribution to Brooding.” Dominic snorts and shakes his head, hands shoved deep in his pockets, but when a teenage cousin insists on drawing a tiny spanner on the trophy base “for fixing stuff and not legging it,” a few older relatives murmur agreement, and the laughter shifts into something warmer. The title sticks, half‑mocking but, to Dominic’s own reluctant surprise, unexpectedly honouring the quiet graft behind his presence.
By the time the improvised ceremony fizzles out, the room has collectively reframed what used to be sore points, Marnie’s on‑again‑off‑again departures, Will’s big talk, Dominic’s exits, as running gags in a long family serial rather than fatal character flaws. The teasing is gentler now, threaded with acknowledgements of what each person actually does for the others. Marnie is voted “Best At Getting Us All In One Room,” with a footnote (added by an aunt in shaky capitals) “EVEN WHEN SHE’S HALF OUT THE DOOR.” Will collects “Most Likely To Find Wi‑Fi In A Storm,” the sub‑clause “AND YOU A BILL AFTER” provoking a roar that lands more fond than wary. Dominic ends up with “Most Reliable Emergency Contact Even When He Pretends He Isn’t,” his name circled in thick ink as if to make the point stick. The humour doesn’t erase the evening’s bruises, but it files their edges, turning individual embarrassments into shared material. In that softened atmosphere, a new hierarchy can take tentative root without feeling like a public shaming of anyone’s past performance, merely an amendment to the household rules.
In the lull after the jokes, conversations thin into smaller pockets, and people’s bodies tell a new story about rank. The ones who’d spent the earlier hours narrating their LinkedIns out loud drift, almost without noticing, towards doorways and the edges of the room, where they can keep talking without being particularly listened to. The centre of gravity shifts instead to the people who never tried to claim it: the aunt who has been quietly washing up pans between punchlines; the cousin who noticed which chair wobbled and stuck a folded beer mat under its leg; the teenager who kept an eye on the kids tearing up and down the stairs.
Dominic feels it rather than sees it at first, an easing around his shoulders as people address him not as the problem son or the prodigal, but as a bloke who happens to know where the fuse box is. When an older cousin asks, half‑joking, if the bannister will survive another Christmas, he rises automatically to rattle it, promising to “have a look properly next time I’m down,” and no one makes a crack about “if” he’s ever down again. The exchange is small, domestic, but it draws a little cluster of nods that feel suspiciously like acceptance.
Near the doorway to the front room, someone clocks his dad dozing more peacefully than he has all night, head tipped back, mouth slightly open, the television’s blue‑grey light fluttering over his face. An aunt, lowering her voice as if not to wake him, murmurs that it’s because “everyone finally said what they meant for once.” There’s a brief ripple of agreement, no applause, no big moral, but the comment settles like a verdict.
It reads, to Dominic, not as praise for whoever shouted loudest, or came out looking cleverest, but for the bare fact of people staying in the bloody room. Nobody flounced, nobody vanished to sulk in a taxi; they stuck it out through the awkward bits until the shouting turned into sentences and the sentences into a sort of truce. Around him, chairs scrape closer rather than back. The unspoken promotion is clear enough: it’s not the people who win the arguments who command the most respect now, but the ones who can bear to have them without walking away.
Around the table, talk about money and “making it” shifts from competitive tallying to pragmatic cross‑checking, like everyone’s finally admitting the test was marked wrong to begin with. The earlier bragging about square footage and job titles gives way to questions with numbers in them. Will, no longer fronting as the golden boy, sits with a notepad between two older uncles who prod gently at his spreadsheets, asking about interest rates and supplier terms, not to catch him out but to see where the holes are before they swallow him. Every so often he glances up at Dominic, who just nods once, as if to say: you asked, now let them help.
Marnie, instead of holding court, leans in to listen as a cousin lays out how they’ve juggled care work, zero‑hours contracts and childcare without collapsing, sharing tips on which agencies actually pay on time and how to badger the council without crying. Ryan throws in the occasional clarification about overdrafts and consumer rights; Sebastian, notably, does not. The emerging consensus is unsentimental: status symbols are fragile, but the people who answer the phone at midnight or show up with jumper cables are the ones you actually build a life around. And the ones you quietly promote in your own private league table.
When talk drifts, inevitably, to “what’s next,” Seabridge stops being invoked as either a trap or a shrine and starts sounding more like a junction box you can wire into from several directions. A younger cousin, usually told off for “thinking she’s too good for here,” is, to her visible confusion, urged on: Lena promises to look over her personal statement, Dominic offers to take her out round the industrial estate on Sundays until she can pass her test, “so you’re not at the mercy of the last bus.” An aunt who’s never had a passport lists, with pride rather than envy, the cities her neighbours’ kids now call home, and how they’re still back for funerals, christenings, boiler breakdowns. The notion settles that belonging isn’t forfeit at the town boundary; it’s something you re‑negotiate, each time you cross it or invite someone in.
The earlier glamour of outside validation, Sebastian’s estate connections, Ryan’s professional polish, even city friends name‑dropped by Marnie and Lena, loses some of its charge under this new lens. Instead of asking, “Could they get us out?” relatives start asking, “Would they still know us if things went wrong?” Tales surface of the cousin who married money and now sends only mass Christmas emails, contrasted with the one who remembers to post back up school photos he’s scanned. Dominic, still slightly hunched in his chair, finds that when he admits to living hand‑to‑mouth between contracts, no one laughs; an uncle snorts, “Aye, that’s work, that,” and a couple of cousins look relieved, as if someone has finally said out loud that escape routes can be drafty, too, and sometimes lead straight into another cul‑de‑sac.
By the time the washing‑up is mostly done and people begin to pull on coats, an unspoken rubric for worth has settled over the room: not who left, who stayed, who earns the most or dresses the best, but who can be relied on to tell the truth about where they are and what they can offer, without embroidery or self‑pity. Seabridge, in this light, is less a pass/fail exam and more a shared reference point: something you can step away from without disowning, or return to without fanfare, provided you don’t pretend the intervening years were anything other than messy. That new standard is what Dominic carries with him when he steps out onto the porch with Lena: his presence here is no longer a test he’s destined to fail, but a deliberate, almost workmanlike choice to sit in the uncomfortable middle ground and see what, and who, might be repaired there, bolt by bolt, conversation by conversation.
At first they stand shoulder to shoulder without quite looking at each other, the damp seeping cold through the concrete step, the sodium‑orange streetlight making the wet tarmac shine like something oiled and deliberate. Rain ticks in the guttering above them; somewhere down the street a door bangs and a voice calls a dog in, the sound softened by the weather.
Dominic feels the familiar ache in his shoulders from the drive and from the evening’s performances, the sense of having been both invisible and scrutinised. Beside him, Lena shifts her weight so their sleeves just brush. He can smell wet wool and whatever ink she’s been using, undercut by the faint frying‑fat ghost that never quite leaves the house.
Lena breaks the silence, not with one of the polished little explanations he’s heard her give elderly aunties, but with a crooked smile and: “It’s ridiculous, really. I’ve spent years writing clever sentences about places like Seabridge, and I still need you to remind me which chippy hasn’t betrayed us to frozen batter.”
He huffs, the corner of his mouth twitching. “You call that betrayal, you’ve not seen the state of the oil in some of the ones I’ve worked near.”
She laughs, properly, the sound fogging in the cool air. “Exactly my point. I can write a whole chapter on the symbolism of the promenade’s decline, but ask me who still does decent curry sauce and I’m suddenly the worst kind of tourist.”
The joke lands softer than sarcasm, an offering rather than a dig. She keeps her gaze on the street, as if the answer might be written in the slick reflections, and adds, more quietly, “I’m very good at being authoritative from a safe distance. Less good at knowing how to just…be here, without turning it into material.”
That small confession hangs between them, warmer than the porch light, an opening for something less academic and more dangerous.
He lets the words out on a breath, more observation than accusation. “Yeah, well. Some of us are just data to you lot, aren’t we?”
It comes out roughened by weariness rather than anger, and he’s half‑ready for her to bristle, to launch into a defence of ethics forms and anonymised interviews. Instead, Lena’s shoulders dip in something like agreement.
“Sometimes,” she says, and the simplicity of it wrong‑foots him. She pushes her glasses up with an ink‑stained knuckle, watching the rain silver the street. “Not on purpose. But it’s…easier, you know? To put people in headings. ‘Mobility’, ‘aspiration’, ‘local attachment’.” Her mouth twists. “You all get to be neat little examples that prove my point, and I get to pretend that doesn’t make me a coward.”
He glances at her, startled by the word.
“I can manage the mess on paper,” she goes on, voice low. “Footnotes, case studies, all that. But when I’m actually here, with you lot making tea and starting arguments over the telly, ” she huffs a small, self‑directed laugh “, it’s too close. If I let myself feel it properly, I’m not the clever observer any more. I’m just another person who left and doesn’t know how to stand in her own kitchen.”
Her admission knocks a piece out of his own defences. He tracks a bead of water as it snakes down the glass, then, almost against his will, starts talking. Not the polished, jokey version about “keeping his options open”, but the stops and starts: the garages that promised full‑time then cut his hours, the temp contracts that always ended “for now, we’ll be in touch”, the bedsits with thin walls and landlords who only remembered his name on rent day. How it was easier to text that he was “between things” than drive back and let them all see he’d circled right round to nowhere. He doesn’t give her the break‑up, or the properly ugly rows, but enough. Enough that the old family myth of Dominic‑the‑drifter slips sideways; his leaving sounds, for once, less like swaggering refusal and more like a man ducking his head and keeping in motion so no one could say, with evidence, that he’d failed and stayed failed.
The porch light chooses that moment to buzz and flicker, casting them in stuttering shadow like a faulty interrogation. Without thinking, both reach up to the loose plastic casing, hands knocking together in the cramped doorway. Dominic laughs first, muttering about dodgy wiring and landlords who never come back to finish a job; Lena follows, half‑teasing that she’s only qualified to write a paper on symbolic infrastructure failure, not actually fix it. Their fingers, briefly brushing as they steady the fitting, send a small, precise jolt through the joke. Less theatrical than a deliberate touch, and therefore somehow more real.
When the bulb steadies, neither of them steps back at once; the space between feels newly, awkwardly deliberate. Lena, voice roughened, admits she has made a profession of always having “an exit route in her bag”: grant schemes, fellowships, the next city. Dominic confesses he keeps a go‑bag in his head: motorway junctions, contacts, excuses. They draft no vows, only share the faintly shocking relief of owning how bone‑deep tiring it is to live as if every room, every town, every person is a waiting room.
Dominic taps the biro against the table, a soft, irregular tick that slots into the kitchen’s after‑dinner clatter. On the back of the menu, beneath an oil stain that has long ago fixed itself into the paper like a coastline, he drags a line down the centre and writes, with the careful capitals of someone more used to filling in forms than making manifestos: IF I STAY.
Underneath, he starts a rough column. “MOTs,” he mutters as he prints it, “proper diagnostics, no more cash‑in‑hand bodge jobs for Barry down the lane.” The words look both too big and too small for the space. He adds “steady hours?” with a question mark so aggressive it might as well be a threat.
Marnie leans in until her chin almost grazes the table, hair falling forward, reading upside‑down. “You’ll frighten the customers with that punctuation,” she says, and, without asking, nudges his hand aside to add, in her neater script, “a waiting room that doesn’t smell like old oil and Lynx.” She underlines Lynx twice. “Maybe even, brace yourself, a pot plant that isn’t slowly dying in the corner.”
He snorts. “Right. ‘Harlow &… whoever,’ specialising in MOTs and horticulture.”
She clicks her tongue, enjoying herself. “And somewhere to sit that isn’t a cracked plastic chair off a skip. New kettle. Decent tea bags. Radio that plays something other than whatever the last lad left on.”
“Now you’re just showing off,” he says, but he writes RADIO? in his own column, then, after a beat, adds “no more sharing a room over a takeaway in some grim industrial estate Travelodge.”
Marnie’s gaze flicks to that, then to his face, softer. “So. Less… in transit. More… here.”
He shrugs one shoulder, watching the ink feather slightly where the menu’s grease has thinned the paper. “Something like that,” he says, as if it is nothing more binding than a scribble, but he does not cross it out.
Opposite his scrawl, she writes, with an exaggerated little sigh, “IF I GO” across the top of her half, the letters looping and self‑conscious. Underneath she doodles a lopsided aeroplane, nose too blunt, wings uneven, trailing a ridiculous plume of exhaust. “That’s reassuring,” Dominic says. “Looks like it’s going down over Hartlepool.”
“Rude,” she murmurs, but she colours in the tiny cockpit window anyway, as if somebody inside needs a face. Below it, in smaller, tighter letters that seem to hunch into themselves, she adds: “visa forms, time zones, Mum’s face on Zoom.” Her voice dips as she speaks the words she’s writing, not quite matching their jokey capitals.
“Whole new talent,” she says, eyes on the biro, “getting lost in airport lounges and rented flats where nobody knows how to pronounce Seabridge, or that it isn’t near bloody Scarborough.” The admission lands between them with less drama than a confession and more weight than a gag. Her pen hesitates, then adds, almost under her breath, “forgetting which life’s the real one,” and she underlines nothing, as if afraid that would make it binding.
Dominic chews the inside of his cheek, then sketches a wavering arrow that loops messily from IF I STAY to IF I GO and back again, as if the menu itself can’t decide which column to obey. “Maybe,” he says, half to the paper, “success doesn’t have to mean cutting this place out like a bad bit of wiring. Could just… reroute it.”
Marnie lets out a soft, incredulous snort. “Careful, that sounded almost like nuance.” She writes “VISITING CONSULTANT” by his side, complete with a smug little crown, and “FREQUENT FLYER” under her plane, adding a halo of daft speed lines. The labels are comic, but as their pens circle and recircle the arrows, the notion that moving back and forth, physically, emotionally, might be a deliberate pattern rather than evidence of having failed to choose begins, tentatively, to feel less like cowardice and more like permission.
An aunt shoulders past with a stack of plates, apron flapping, and observes to the room at large, “You two always were the awkward ones.” The words land like an old label hauled out of the airing cupboard. They pause, then exchange a dry, colluding look; Marnie neatly underlines “awkward” on the menu and adds, “Refusing the script since ’98,” which makes Dominic’s mouth twitch into something perilously close to pride.
He caps the biro with a decisive click and slides the menu between the salt cellar and the napkin holder like a makeshift contract, murmuring that whatever they end up doing, him under a bonnet here, her at boarding gates there, they’re done being held up as matching cautionary exhibits. “Same side, different routes,” he adds. Marnie nods, taps the hidden paper with two fingers as if witnessing a signature, and says, “Right. If they come for you, they get me too.” It sounds light, but the pact settles between them with the solid, unfussy weight of something finally agreed.
By the time Will corners Ryan in the hallway, the air has that post‑storm heaviness. Voices lowered, doors cracking open and shut, the kettle boiling yet again as if the family means to drown unease in tea. The earlier swagger is gone; his checked shirt hangs open at the throat, and there’s a dampness at his temples that isn’t entirely from the weather.
He doesn’t open with a joke or a line about “smashing it lately.” Instead, he hovers beside Ryan like a lad outside the headmaster’s office, thumb worrying the edge of his phone case. “Can we. “I need you to look at something. Properly. Before it all goes… under.”
There’s no sales rhythm to it, no buzzwords about scaling. The words “need you” seem to surprise him as much as anyone. He jerks his head towards the stairs, already starting up them as if he might bolt if given half a chance.
Ryan catches the flicker of panic in his eyes and the extra half‑second he waits by the first step, wanting to be followed without having to ask again. It is not, in any professional sense, the ideal time or place. But the house is a warren of half‑closed doors and half‑heard accusations; the stairwell, narrow and carpet‑worn, offers at least the illusion of privacy.
“Alright,” Ryan says, keeping his voice low, deliberately neutral. Neither matey nor officious. “Let’s go somewhere you can breathe.”
Will exhales sharply, as if permission has been dragged out of him, and leads the way up a few steps, the banister grazing his knuckles. He looks, Ryan thinks, less like an entrepreneur on the brink of a big move and more like a man edging himself towards a confession, hoping the person beside him will prove priest rather than executioner.
They settle awkwardly halfway up the staircase, where the landing widens just enough for two people and a bad idea. Carpet worn thin under their trainers, knees knocking the banister, they balance the laptop on the step between them like a small, indifferent judge. The glow from the screen turns their faces ghost‑pale in the dim yellow of the hall light, flattening them into two anxious men rather than the roles they usually play.
As the machine grinds awake and the spreadsheets load, the house hums around them: cutlery clinking in the kitchen, a cupboard door thudding shut, a burst of laughter from the front room that sounds slightly too bright. Someone coughs on the landing above and the floorboard protests; the kettle shrieks and clicks off. Ordinary noises, but they pass over this little pocket of suspended time.
Will scrolls through overdue invoices and politely phrased threats, fingers jerking on the trackpad, his usual patter collapsing into grunts and muttered dates. Every fresh red figure that swims into focus seems to shave another layer off him, until the hustle is gone and only the debt remains.
Ryan leans in, scanning column after column, lips tightening as the colour drains from whatever cheery script he’d planned. He scrolls back to a tab he recognises and he cannot, in honesty, pretend surprise. With a wince that matches Will’s, he starts listing, quietly, the optimistic projections he’d waved through, the “you’ll be fine, mate” reassurances delivered when he’d been more interested in looking sharp in front of potential clients than in keeping Will solvent. Each admission lands like a pin pushed into a map of their shared vanity. Saying it out loud strips the last of the mates‑rates illusion: between them, they’ve built a rickety stage, not a safety net, and both have been performing on it.
Between the creak of someone passing on the landing and a shout from the kitchen about who’s taking leftovers, they sketch the bones of something cleaner: no more off‑the‑cuff tips over pints, proper letters of engagement, agreed fees, emails instead of WhatsApp threads that blur cousin chat with client notes, clear records of who’s responsible for what and when. The laptop becomes less a magic escape hatch and more a ledger of obligations, risks and boundaries they’re finally willing to name aloud and sign their names beneath.
Ryan shuts the lid with a soft click, severing the blue glare. Will looks wrecked but oddly straighter‑backed, his hustle at last turned to plugging leaks instead of pricing new sails. Ryan, acutely aware that every line item now grazes his own professional skin, promises a written plan next week: not a favour, but work he’ll sign for. When they unfold themselves from the stair, knees cracking, the current between them has changed: no fizz of a flashy tip‑off, but the steadier, more sobering charge of shared risk and mutual accountability.
The front room feels oddly airless, curtains half‑drawn against the streetlights, as Marnie and Sebastian sit angled toward each other on opposite ends of the sagging sofa. The TV hums with a rerun nobody is really watching, its canned laughter a soft, irrelevant counterpoint as they swap practised smiles that don’t quite reach their eyes. The lamplight throws polite shadows across his pressed shirt and her slightly rumpled jumper; between them, a low table crowded with mugs and an ashtray no one has used in years becomes a kind of demilitarised zone.
“Your mother has been very kind,” Sebastian begins, in the tone of a man opening a board meeting. “I should hate to give her the impression that I am, how shall we put it, dragging my feet.”
Marnie’s mouth tilts. “She already thinks you’re a saint for putting up with me, so your reputation’s safe.” Her finger circles the chip on the mug’s rim, a domestic orbit she has traced a thousand times. “But if we’re talking impressions… perhaps we don’t need to give anyone the idea that we’re… imminently stationery.”
“Stationery?” he repeats, amused despite himself.
“Engaged. Fixed. Pinned to the noticeboard,” she supplies. “With little heart‑shaped drawing pins.”
He exhales, a short, genuine laugh that promptly flattens. “No. Quite.” His eyes flick to the muted screen, as if the soap characters might offer precedent. “It has all escalated rather briskly, hasn’t it? The Christmas invitation lists. The talk of houses. Dogs.” A microscopic hesitation. “Children.”
“Don’t forget the aga.” Her voice is light but the word lands heavy between them. “And the commute from here to your family’s idea of civilisation.”
“Which I believe you once described as ‘Pride and Prejudice with better plumbing,’” he says. “You were not wrong.”
She huffs. “You liked that, as I recall.”
“I did. I do. I simply, ” He smooths an invisible crease from his trouser leg, buying time. “I wonder whether we have allowed other people’s timelines to colonise our own.”
“That’s a very elegant way of saying we’ve been playing at being more serious than we are,” Marnie replies. “And we’re both too old to call it a phase.”
He inclines his head, conceding the point. “If we step back a little in public, it need not mean… drama. Simply a recalibration. Fewer assumptions. Fewer speeches about ‘next steps’ at your aunt’s dining table.”
“And fewer evenings where you’re wheeled out as my proof that I’m not a complete disaster,” she adds, quieter. “You don’t have to keep auditioning for the part of Responsible Boyfriend in front of everyone. I know you can be responsible. Unfortunately.”
“Cruel,” he murmurs, but the faint smile acknowledges the accuracy. “And in return, you will not be required to demonstrate that you are perfectly content to transform into Lady Whatever‑It‑May‑Be on schedule.”
“Tempting as the tiara is,” she says, “I think we can both live without the rehearsal dinner.”
A murmur from the hallway swells, then ebbs again; the house breathes around them, faintly impatient. Sebastian’s gaze returns to her, sharper now, stripped of show. “So. We agree? Less… promotional material. More honesty. No great announcement, merely a quiet… cooling of expectations.”
“Elegant de‑prioritising,” Marnie echoes his earlier phrase, rolling it on her tongue. “You keep your London dinners uncomplicated. I keep my family from pricing up hats. We stop pretending this is headed somewhere it might not be.”
“And if, in future, it should head there after all,” he says, ever the strategist, “we shall arrive by choice, not momentum.”
She studies him for a beat, then nods. “That, I can live with.”
The canned laughter on the television swells for a moment, oddly well‑timed, as if some off‑screen audience approves of their negotiated half‑step back from each other’s futures.
It is oddly soothing, talking in that cool, tidy way; they both know how to do minutes and action points far better than they know how to do heartbreak. Their sentences arrive in neat, professional clauses (“optics,” “managing expectations,” “keeping things simple”) as if they are drafting a joint press release rather than loosening a life they have been politely trying on. The language gives them cover: no one has to say “I’m frightened,” or “I don’t see you when I picture myself old.”
Marnie keeps her eyes on the milky dregs of tea, thumb following the hairline crack in the china. She hears herself decline, in advance, an entire social calendar: she cannot promise Easter in Berkshire, or the summer wedding in Surrey where she was meant to laugh in the photographs and confirm everyone’s suspicions about rings. Sebastian, listening with the patient nod of a man absorbing a complex brief, smooths his cuff and, after a pause, concedes his own side of the ledger: that the country‑house invitations, the shooting weekends and art‑fundraisers, might in fact be easier if he arrives unaccompanied for a while.
Between them, the terms arrange themselves with the neatness of a properly balanced spreadsheet. No more careful, forward‑looking references to “the long term” dropped like tranquiliser darts into the laps of reassuring aunties; no more artfully framed photos of Seabridge sunsets, posted from his account, captioned with wry asides about “learning to love the simple life” for the benefit of city friends. He will not be advanced round the family like an early‑access version of a nearly‑fiancé at Christmas, invited to preview the role of son‑in‑law. She, in turn, will retire from duty as his cheerful provincial evidence of “relatability” at London dinners. They both consent to stop rehearsing a future which, they finally admit, neither of them has yet chosen.
The cousin’s head pops round the door with a breezy, “Anyone for a cuppa, then?” and the spell fractures into ordinary time. Marnie’s “In a minute,” is tossed back lightly enough to discourage follow‑up. Sebastian rises first, smoothing his jumper, and steps aside with a small, almost courtly gesture that cedes the room, the kettle, the evening to the family’s jurisdiction rather than his.
He mentions the rain, the stuffiness, some anodyne reason any outsider might plead, and lets the doorframe pass between him and the family’s weather. It is a tactful retreat, timed before anyone can ask his view on what happens next. By vacating the front room, he quietly redraws himself as honoured guest rather than stakeholder, his concern firmly elsewhere.
In the crush of bodies and the rustle of carrier bags, the new social map sketches itself almost in spite of everyone’s efforts not to notice such things. Coats are shrugged on, Tupperware changes hands like diplomatic gifts, and yet certain people, quite without committee or announcement, acquire borders.
Dominic finds himself stationed, posted, really, at the kitchen doorway, half‑blocking it in a way that would once have earned him a, “Shift, will you?” and a shove. Now no one quite asks him to move. One hand rests on the doorframe he tightened up last month, thumb running unconsciously over the smooth knot in the grain like a man testing his own work, while the other becomes a signal for who may pass with a tray and who must wait.
Questions start hitting him from both directions (front room and kitchen) ricocheting off his shoulders and landing in a shabby queue. Is the leaky tap “worth getting a proper look at,” or will a bit of tape do? Did he hear that there’s a small unit going cheap on the industrial estate, might suit a man who knows his way round an engine? Does he reckon the car will last another winter if Auntie Jude only does the big shop and the bingo?
They arrive muddled, household trivia, speculative business, quiet admissions of worry, folded together as if they are all merely variations on the same problem: things wearing out and what, if anything, can be salvaged. He listens, head tipped back against the frame, answering slowly enough that it feels like a conversation, not conscription. His “Well, depends,” carries as much weight now as any uncle’s verdict used to; people actually pause, plastic bags dangling, waiting for him to pronounce whether something is worth the bother, worth the risk, worth the call.
He answers with the same off‑hand competence that used to get him press‑ganged into odd jobs as a teenager, but the texture of it has altered. Back then, instructions were barked and he was expected to get on with it; now there’s a pause built in, a small holding of breath while people wait to see what he thinks. His verdict, “Nah, that’s a plumber job,” or “Leave estate agents well alone till you’ve seen the roof yourself”, lands not as back‑chat but as guidance, a modest redistribution of authority along the cramped corridor.
“Only if they’ve actually done the work they promised,” he says, when someone mentions a landlord’s offer to “sort it all out” before renewal. “Get it in writing, or don’t bank on it.” The remark earns a thoughtful hum instead of the old, “Alright, Mr Know‑It‑All.”
Just to his left, Lena lingers with her coat already on, one hand tucked in her pocket, the other worrying the strap of her bag. She listens with a tilted head that is more human than academic now, resisting the professional itch to classify, to nudge for fuller accounts. The part of her that files everything away, tone, deference, who glances at whom before speaking, works quietly on its own, but she does not reach for her notebook. Tonight, the fact that everyone is leaning a little towards Dominic belongs to him and to them, not to any future article.
At the dining table, half‑cleared plates and gravy‑ringed bowls form a makeshift barricade, a low wall of domestic fortifications behind which one might, in theory, take cover. Marnie, however, sits forward, forearms resting among the cutlery, when the inevitable comes: “So when are you off again then?”
She does not laugh it away this time. “Soon, probably. But I’ll be back. Just… not sure how, yet.” The words land lighter than the knot in her stomach, but they are at least true.
For once no one reaches for the usual lines about “another phase” or “you’ll settle when you’ve had your fun.” There is a small, audible shift, chairs creak, someone clears a throat, as older relatives nod, as if what they have heard is not a whim to be corrected but a course she is permitted to chart and re‑chart herself. A cousin opens her mouth, then seems to think better of it, and the gap where the teasing would have gone feels, unexpectedly, like respect.
By the sink, Ryan occupies a liminal strip of lino between family and farewell. Someone presses a stack of neatly labelled Tupperware into his hands with the same casual trust as offering leftovers to a cousin, and a beat later Will slides over a dog‑eared folder of receipts and printouts, murmuring, “If you’ve got a minute Monday… just to get my head straight. Properly. I’ll pay.” Ryan meets his eye long enough to make it clear this will be work, not gossip with a side of advice, and tucks the folder into his satchel with a small, formal nod that acknowledges both the favour and the boundary.
By the stairs, Sebastian fetches his immaculate coat from the bannister where Dominic earlier tightened a loose spindle, fingertips brushing the steadier rail as if noting a quiet correction. His farewell is courteous and almost ceremonious (thanks for having him, drive carefully, we’ll be in touch) addressed to the household like a board of governors rather than the backdrop to his romance. No one moves to escort him; people merely look up, murmur replies, return to stacking plates or hunting for scarves. The formality, the unremarked distance, amount to a small, collective minute taken and signed off: whatever narrative proceeds in Seabridge will do so under a local authority in which he neither holds, nor now expects to hold, any enduring office.
In the kitchen, Dominic stands with one hand on the back of a chair, thumb worrying at a loose screw he has already tightened twice tonight, watching Lena shrug into her coat by the back door. The glass is filmed with steam, the yard beyond a blur of damp concrete and next‑door’s sagging rotary line; the rain has softened to a drizzle that catches the yellow spill from the porch light.
Their conversation from the doorstep clings to the warm air between them. Half‑jokes about research grants and MOT failures, the comparative merits of funding deadlines versus failed alternators. He had told her, with a sideways grin, that at least engines didn’t pretend to be anything other than knackered when they went, and she had replied that academics were very like exhaust systems: the noisiest ones often least effective. Somewhere between carburettors and conference abstracts, they had admitted, almost by accident, that both of them keep one eye on the exit wherever they go.
Now, with the house humming around them, cutlery clinking, an uncle laughing in the front room, the kettle thinking about boiling again, that admission hangs quieter, more deliberate. Lena pushes her glasses up her nose with an ink‑stained knuckle. “If I write about this lot,” she says, tilting her head towards the muffled chorus beyond the door, “I’ll have to pretend I’m not part of it.”
“Good luck with that,” Dominic says. “Town’d riot if you get us wrong.”
She smiles, small and genuine. “You could always fact‑check me.”
“Yeah,” he answers, after a beat. “If I’m still here.”
They don’t try to tidy the conditional away. She does not tell him he ought to leave again while he’s still young enough to start over; he does not suggest that coming back to teach, or to write, would be the honest thing for her to do. Instead, there is a shared, wry acceptance that leaving and staying are both kinds of work: long, repetitive labour with no guarantee of promotion, merely different kinds of overtime.
“Either way,” Lena says, fingers on the door handle now, “we’re not just… visiting any more. Are we?”
Dominic studies the scuffed lino, the chair under his hand, the damp patches on the ceiling he could map blindfold. “Reckon we’re on the books,” he says. “At least for tonight.”
She lets out a breath that might be a laugh. “I’ll put that in the acknowledgements.”
He snorts. “Don’t you dare.”
They have not forgiven each other their earlier misreadings so much as re‑filed them: her habit of turning lives into case studies, his of treating any question as an inspection. Standing here, they have, for once, seen each other clearly enough to admit that the line between observing a place and being claimed by it is narrower than this strip of lino by the back door.
Lena pulls the door open; the cool, salt‑tanged air folds in. For a moment she pauses on the threshold, half in, half out, the very picture of the choices they have been circling all evening. “Night, Dom.”
“Text when you get back,” he says, then, catching himself, amends with a rueful twist of his mouth, “Or, you know, write a peer‑reviewed article.”
She laughs properly this time. “I’ll send you the draft.”
And then she is gone, boots on wet paving, coat hood lifting in the wind. Dominic stays where he is, fingers resting on the steadied chair, listening to the soft thud of the door as it closes. Behind him, someone calls his name to ask where the bin bags are. Ahead of him, the yard gleams under the thin rain. Between those two small claims, he stands for a moment longer, feeling unreasonably, unexpectedly, accounted for.
At the table, now bare except for a few ring marks and a half‑finished brew going that pale, abandoned colour, Marnie traces circles in a spill of tea while Dominic stacks plates into uneven towers. The fluorescent strip light hums; somewhere behind them a drawer bangs, an uncle swears mildly at a misplaced lid. Their low‑voiced exchange about job offers and broken vans has taken the edge off years of one‑upmanship so thoroughly that even their jokes land softer.
Marnie admits, in a rush and then more calmly, that Berlin is not a romantic impulse but an actual contract with dates and clauses; he confesses that the van “just needing a bit of work” is three weeks from being repossessed if he cannot magic a solution. Neither pretends to have the better plan. Instead they trade possibilities like contraband, Berlin flats, rented lock‑ups on the industrial estate, doing seasonal stints and calling that a life, staying put and daring that to count as ambition.
Between them, “wasting your chances” quietly gives way to “choosing your own risks,” a pact sealed not with a hug but with a quick, conspiratorial glance as an aunt bustles past, depositing more cutlery in front of Dominic as if formally assigning him to the washing‑up, and by extension, to the family.
In the cramped hallway, Will leans against the hot radiator opposite Ryan, carrier bag of cling‑filmed sandwiches biting into his fingers. The usual patter has drained from his voice; numbers come out instead of buzzwords, dates instead of “scaling up,” the precise figure he is behind on the van, the month the storage unit padlock will change if he misses one more payment. Ryan listens like a solicitor at a first consultation rather than a mate at a party: short, clarifying questions; no winces, no indulgent “you’ll be fine, mate.” He refuses to promise miracles over lukewarm lager, offers instead to go through the contracts in daylight, at his office, with proper folders and a clock. The promise is narrower than Will once imagined, but for the first time it feels like something he might actually be able to stand on rather than surf.
By the front window, the lace curtain breathing faintly with the outside air, Marnie and Sebastian have already finished their reckoning: the phrases “taking the pressure off” and “seeing how things feel in a few months” hang like emptied picture hooks on the wall between them. He offers a courteous half‑smile, more habit than feeling; she returns it with professional politeness. When he finally steps out into the wet street, her posture doesn’t collapse in his wake; she simply shifts her weight, sets down her wine glass, and smooths an imaginary crease from her jumper, as if laying aside a prop she no longer needs to hold up. Whatever story they’ve been selling recedes to the status of a chapter rather than the whole book, filed mentally between “sensible choices” and “near‑misses” rather than under “happily ever after.”
In the kitchen, Dominic runs hot water over a pan gone black at the edges, shoulders finally unhooked from his ears. His mother moves slower now, not directing but pottering, as if conceding the shift. Upstairs, Lena’s borrowed room clicks shut; on the landing, Marnie’s suitcase stands half‑zipped, not yet bound for anywhere, but no longer pretending it isn’t packed.