Harri checked her watch: 11.58. Two minutes off an hour. More than any reasonable person could be expected to wait. But she wasn’t a reasonable person. She was desperate to reclaim a life she’d lost a few painful weeks ago. She’d been lured here by hope, and to leave would be admitting it had been extinguished.

But in the end, after another twenty minutes of sitting there with a gnawing sense of inevitability, Harri finally accepted defeat. John Marlowe, the man who’d emailed her, promising she would get her job back if she came to this meeting, had been yet another troll, a liar who felt entitled to waste her time and humiliate her because she’d been so successfully cast as the villain by the local papers.

Another dead end.

She asked Denise for the bill, paid in change, and drifted into the shop. There were tables and chairs arranged between bookshelves, and the hubbub of conversation filled the room. Friends and family bound together by shared experience. She had nothing to keep her company. Ever since that awful night, her life had been one misstep after another. She desperately wanted what all these people had: an ordinary life. She wanted to feel good. Overwhelmed by loneliness, her mind reached, as it had so many times, for Ben. He’d made her feel good for a while, and she was afraid she’d never meet anyone like him again. Self-pity brought tears to her eyes.

Great, she thought. A private humiliation and a public embarrassment. She hurried towards a flight of stairs and a sign that read ‘Toilets’.

Her footsteps echoed around the narrow, crooked stairwell, and the sounds of the cafe faded as she emerged into an almost deserted second-hand books section. Cracked spines sliced long runs of other less damaged but clearly used books. Beyond the high shelves, almost directly opposite the top of the stairs, was a corridor that led to the toilets, where she might find a mirror in which she could check her make-up, and the privacy to compose herself. There was only one problem. The old man who stood between her and the corridor. He looked startled, as though her rushed arrival had caught him in some mischief.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, fighting for composure.

‘Please don’t apologize,’ he replied, obviously trying to recover his own.

‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

He smiled indulgently and his face creased like an unmade bed. ‘You didn’t. I was just thinking.’

His eyes fell and for a moment Harri forgot her own worries. The man’s sadness hit her like a wave. His craggy face was downcast and his eyes were heavy and shining with the prospect of a storm. His mop of grey hair was neatly combed, and he looked as though he was dressed for a date. His tweed jacket, black trousers, and white shirt were well pressed, and his red woven silk tie was bright and clean. If he was on a date, then like her, he had been stood up, because there was no one else around. He was tall, and might once have been handsome, but whatever gifts youth had conferred were long gone. Only a brightness in his eyes hinted at the charisma that might have drawn people to him and the energy he might have had long ago. His slight frame was angled against a supportive ebony walking stick. Harri took a generous guess he was the right side of ninety. She wanted to get past him, but felt awkward as it seemed as though he was expecting a conversation.