Chapter 1
Ewan
On Friday the office empties early. Siobhan, the product owner, zips her laptop into her bag and talks to Marcus about her next holiday, in an Irish voice that reaches every desk.
“I’m done with the Atlantic.” She pulls her coat off the rack. “It rained on me in three countries.”
“So where are you walking on your own this time, you madwoman?”
“I’m thinking of the Mediterranean this time. A coast path in September, when the schools are back.”
Marcus holds the door for her. “Book it, then.”
“This weekend.” She waves over her shoulder. “Night, Ewan.”
“Night, Shiv.” The door swings shut behind them, and the floor goes so quiet that he can hear the fridge hum. One other person is still here, at a desk by the window.
Charlotte Reid has said one word to him in a year that was not about work, and she has said it every morning.
“Morning.” Not to him, exactly. To the room, on her way past his desk to the seat by the window, where the headphones go on and stay on until she leaves. He answers it every day, and by the time he looks up she is past him, so that in a year he has never seen her say it.
They have talked, of course. A year of the same weekly meetings, where she answers what she is asked and nothing else. A team dinner where she sat at the far end and left before dessert. He has been curious about her since her first week, and has never had her to himself for long enough to learn anything.
So a few minutes later, when he is standing at the coat rack with one arm already in his jacket and hears a small “Ewan” from behind him, he does not place the voice. He turns round expecting the cleaner.
She is standing a good two steps back. Small, fair, brown hair down past her shoulders, a gray cardigan with the sleeves pulled over her hands. She is looking at his shoes.
“Have you got a minute? It’s not about work.”
“Sure.” He gets the other arm into the jacket. “What’s up?”
“I need someone to come with me on Saturday. To a—” She stops. He waits. “It’s the whole day. The evening too. You’d need a suit, if you have one.” She takes a breath that seems to cost her. “It’s a lot to ask.”
Ewan cannot work out what she is asking. What takes a whole Saturday and a suit? And why him?
“Charlotte.” She looks ready to apologize and leave. “It’s fine. Ask.”
She looks up, blue eyes large in a small face, and they go straight back down to his shoes. “My ex is getting married. Tomorrow.”
“Right.” He has no idea yet where this is going.
“And he invited me. And my family. Who are actually excited about it.” A laugh comes out of her with no fun in it. “And I thought, maybe, if you didn’t have plans, you could come with me. As my plus one. Just so there’s one person there who doesn’t know the story.” She looks up again, hopeful and braced at once. “If that’s okay. I mean, you can say no.”
He is so surprised that he laughs. She flinches, and he holds a hand up.
“No. Sorry. That was a happy laugh.” He thinks about tomorrow. Tomorrow is a walk he has not planned and a song he has not finished, and a wedding full of strangers next to Charlotte Reid is the most interesting offer anyone has made him in months. “I’d love to. I don’t have plans. Just one question.”
“Oh.” The relief goes through her whole body. Her shoulders come down, her hands come out of the sleeves and clasp in front of her. “Thank you. Thank you, Ewan. It’s going to be, um. Interesting.” Her eyes come up to his face, quick, and the shoulders go back up with them. “Wait. What question?”
“Why me?”
Her cheeks go pink. She looks past him at the coat rack as if the answer might be hanging on it.
“You’re kind,” she tells the coats. “And you’re easy to be around. And I didn’t want to ask anyone who’d make it worse. And you—” She stops herself. “You have a way of making bad things a bit less bad. That’s all.”
He has no idea what she means, and he can feel himself grinning anyway. “That’s a lot of credit for a man you only talk to in tickets.”
“I talk to you.”
“You say good morning to the printer.”
The pink deepens, but the corner of her mouth moves. It is small and gone at once, and he wants it back, because in a year it is the first time her face has done more than nod.
“I’ll text you the details. Time, place, all of it. Don’t worry about a present. You being there is the present.”
“I’ll be there.”
She nods and turns. She gets as far as the door before she looks back over her shoulder and gives him a small wave, low, at hip height, as if anything bigger would be showing off. The door closes behind her.
Ewan stands in the empty office with his jacket on and finds that he is still smiling.
He does know her, in the only way anyone in that office knows her, which is mostly on a screen.
Everybody who builds anything in that office gets a ticket for it eventually, a written note that says what is broken and how to make it break again. Most of the tickets read like a shopping list. Hers do not. Hers are short and land like a slap, and the whole floor quotes them. So does the Austin office, where a student intern called Diego now tests his fixes twice before he sends them her way. “Clicking Save does nothing, which I suppose is one way to keep the data safe.” “Clicking Cancel asks whether I really want to cancel, and offers me OK and Cancel. I pressed Cancel. Either I have canceled the process or the cancellation, and the button is not saying.” His favorite was on a form he had been proud of. The title was three words, “Works. Not well.” Under it she had gone through the form field by field in the same voice. Dry, true, funny.
Her name is at the top of every one of them. In a year he has not heard her make a joke out loud. Ewan went over to her desk once, the week of the form, to tell her that it was the most entertaining ticket anyone had written that month. She said thanks to her screen and put her headphones back on, and he went back to his desk feeling that he had been told, politely, to go away.
He thinks about this on the walk home along the canal, in the long light evening Edinburgh gets in May, and he thinks about it in the kitchen while Frank, the cat, waits for the tin to open. When she writes, she sounds as if she is enjoying herself. When she stands in a room, she looks as if she is waiting to be told off. He wants very much to know which one is coming to the wedding.
His phone buzzes while he is washing up.
“Hi Ewan, it’s Charlotte. Details for tomorrow. Ceremony 3pm, St Mary’s Cathedral, Palmerston Place. Reception from 5 at the Grand Waterfront Hotel on the Shore in Leith. Let me know if you need anything. And thank you again. Really.”
He reads it twice. It is stiffer than the tickets and a good deal warmer than she could manage at the coat rack. He writes back.
“Dress code?”
The reply is fast.
“Invitation says ‘semi-formal’, which the invitation seems to think is a clear instruction. I’m wearing a navy blue cocktail dress. Not too casual and you’ll be fine. If in doubt, dress like you’re about to be photographed next to someone who looks slightly better than you.”
He laughs out loud in his own kitchen. Frank lifts his head from the bowl with contempt.
“Navy. Got it. See you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow. Thanks for being my rock 😊 P.S. That was a joke. You look fine.”
“You’ve never looked.”
“My desk faces the whole room, Ewan. I see everything.”
He puts the phone down on the counter and looks at it for a while.
He owns one suit and has no opinions about it, so he picks the phone back up and asks it what a man should wear to a semi-formal wedding when his date is in a navy cocktail dress. The phone tells him, in its pleasant unbothered voice, that a charcoal or gray suit would complement navy nicely, with a light shirt, a tie in navy or a coordinating color, and perhaps a pocket square that picks up the dress, to show coordination without being too matchy.
“Too matchy.” He snorts, and Frank looks up. “God forbid.”
He takes the charcoal suit out and tries it on. It still fits, and he hangs it on the wardrobe door for the morning. He does not own a pocket square. He owns a navy tie he wore to a funeral, and he decides that will have to be coordination enough.
