LISSA WENT BACK home and called Kim-Ange, who was out with her phone switched off, and of course Lissa couldn’t get her on social media anymore. Then she pulled up the laptop and thought she’d like to get Cormac’s advice. But he hadn’t sent anything over . . . he was out, she realized. It was Friday night and everyone was out except her. She wondered where he was. Surrounded by happy people having an absolutely brilliant time, she imagined. While she was just here.

Perhaps she should say yes to Jake.

Chapter 35

Cormac was very much not having a brilliant time. He got up to use the bathroom—nobody really noticed, he thought, although he wondered if they would all start talking about him as soon as he crossed the room, which of course they did.

He glanced around the large space. Every table was taken up with glamorous people, lipstick shining, hair in bold geometric shapes or tumbling blond or in huge Afros, wearing incredible fashion and big colored glasses. Everyone was laughing and yelling at the top of their voices, or so it seemed. He recognized a few of the faces too; there was someone there who played a doctor on an incredibly popular medical television show that Cormac and Jake watched so they could slag off everything it got wrong about patient care and comment on how they were quite fond of the massive fires and car accidents and extremely not fond of the hard work afterward to get people from simply not being dead to living, functioning humans again.

Well, this was it, he supposed. He wasn’t, he thought, suited to being a Londoner after all. He wasn’t remotely cool enough: he didn’t have any facial hair, he didn’t have a bun, and his trousers weren’t remotely ridiculous enough.

He vowed to use the restroom—which was pitch black and covered in tiny spotlights and marble and stupidly fancy and impractical, which more or less summed up everything he was feeling—then make up an excuse and go, and he’d have to leave some money at the bar or something, or just pay cash, which would make him feel stupid and cheap, but what choice did he have, really, and okay, it was humiliating but it wasn’t, he told himself, as if he’d ever have to see any of these people again. He had never wanted to be sharing a quiet pint in Eck’s more.

He walked into the darkened lavatory, had a pee by touch mostly, then was just washing his hands when he heard a deep groan.

He stopped. There was nobody else in the bathroom, or at least nobody at the urinals.

The groan came again.

“Uh . . . hello?”

Silence. Then a weak moan.