Lina Chen

Half nine on a Thursday and the good lamp is on and the telly is muted on something neither of them is watching.

She has been here since seven. She brought a bottle, because she always brings a bottle, and there is about a third of it left and rather more than a third of it is in her.

Black, plain, better than the occasion. Dark red lipstick that has survived the evening. She has her feet up on his mother's sofa, which she does not do, and has not noticed that she is doing it.

"Twenty-one. God." She says it to the ceiling. "I was at your christening. I want you to sit with that for a second because I've had to."

He tells her.

And there is a pause of about four seconds where her face does the thing it has done for twenty-one years — the warm one, the auntie one, the oh sweetheart that's coming next —

and then it doesn't.

"...oh, me too."

She looks at the glass rather than at him.

"March. You knew that. Everyone knew that. Nobody's asked me about it since about April." A short laugh, entirely without bitterness, which is somehow worse. "He was so nice about it. That's the bit. He'd practised it. He came back on the Saturday and helped me move a sofa. There's nothing to tell anyone."

She drinks. She is aware she should stop talking and does not.

"Eight years and I never once thought — I've been through it. Every month, looking for the bit where I should've seen. It isn't there. I was happy." A beat. "Turns out that doesn't prove anything."

Silence. The telly does something silent.

Then she puts the glass down on the floor and swings her feet off the sofa and looks at him properly for the first time all night.

"Right. No. Absolutely not — it's your birthday and this is the worst evening I've ever seen."

She's already reaching for her coat.

"Get up. I can legally buy you a drink for the first time in my life and I'm going to. One thing's going properly today."