After Penny and Clementine had moved from a village ten miles away to be with their uncle in Havingley, they’d often walk to school with Charlie or hang out after homework club eating jam sandwiches and watching TV. Charlie’s mother was a cleaner at the pub, and had taken Penny and Clementine under her wing, never asking questions about their mother or talking ill of their father, but simply being there as a routine, a benign figure in the background who never overstepped the maternal mark but provided reassurance through continuity. As an adult, Penny recognized that was half the battle of feeling okay on any sort of day-to-day basis: continuity. She’d spent so long in her twenties trying to eschew any kind of banality in routine, and yet it was inevitable as she got older that banality was often the sweetest kind of refuge.

‘You stay here,’ Charlie said to Penny from where they waded through old bottles and kegs in the cellar, in between lunch and dinner service. A voice had infiltrated where they were hanging out whilst also working, and immediately Charlie had identified it as belonging to Priyesh, their wine merchant. Penny rolled her eyes.

‘I’ll deal with him,’ Charlie insisted. ‘I know how. We don’t want him lingering for a whole hour like he did last time he held you hostage.’

Penny fixed her mouth in a traumatized straight line at the memory – Priyesh was a man who liked a monologue, and an audience for it. Not long after she’d taken over, Penny had been cornered by him out by the recycling bins and returned back to the kitchen with visible sunburn she’d been out there that long. She’d avoided him ever since, under the excuse that she didn’t need to interfere with the bar when Charlie was so capable. Really, she simply didn’t like him.

Charlie was gender non-binary and recently had explained – patiently, Penny had thought – that they didn’t want to be referred to as ‘she’ or ‘her’. Charlie was ‘they’ or ‘them’, and had clarified that they didn’t need Penny to understand them in order to respect them, which Penny understood implicitly.

Penny pulled bottles from the wine-rack on the furthest wall as Charlie clamoured up to the bar. She blew dust off of a 2016 bottle of Tignanello Antinori Toscana and admired her find. ‘I might keep this,’ she thought, that prick’s face elbowing its way into her head. She had a sudden image of them by the fire, drinking it together, him taking in the surroundings and admiring this new place she called home. There are a lot of things she would have liked to have told him about the past six months – if they were speaking.