Chapter 13: The Bookkeeper

Steph let it play to the end.

Alfie at twenty-six, sunburnt, toasting the camera with his cava.

The lads on the terrace cheering him like he'd scored.

Then the video froze on his grin, six times over, twelve feet high.

Nobody in the Gold Hound said a word.

I could hear the christening party upstairs, singing to the baby.

Steph lowered her phone and smiled at me across the bar.

"Second choice, Tash," she said. "Always were."

Sandra didn't look surprised.

That was the part that went in.

She'd been on that terrace's guest list in her head for six years.

Alfie had his hands over his face.

"Steph, why would you," he said through his fingers. "Why would you play that?"

"Because she thinks she's won something." Steph tossed the remote on the bar. "She won a man I turned down."

I looked at the frozen screen.

At the boy in the T-shirt who'd married me a month later.

I'd worn Gran's pearls that day.

I'd thought he was nervous because he loved me.

Something in my chest cracked, very quietly.

Then it set.

I walked behind the bar and picked up the remote.

"My turn," I said.

Steph laughed. "Go on, then. Show them your wedding album."

"I'm a bookkeeper," I said. "I've got something much worse."

I'd photographed every page I printed on Friday.

The screens took my phone the way they'd taken hers.

Alfie's grin vanished.

A spreadsheet came up instead, six times, in the Gold Hound's own colours.

The pub's bank account since November.

I didn't read it out.

I didn't have to.

North Street can add up.

"Forty-one grand?" said the old man with the chips. "Paid to S. Yeo?"