in the late evening sun, partly laughing at their big display of emotion, and partly continuing to sob, mother and son united in the grief of missing the man of their lives, wondering how they might carry on without him.
Daniel was glad he’d come after all. It was just the two of them now. They were a team. They needed each other.
28
Nadia
‘Anyone sitting here?’
Nadia looked up to see a tall, red-headed man with a crooked smile. He was gesturing at the seat beside her. Nadia’s second wine glass was empty and the bar had filled up around her. The spot beside her was the only empty seat. How long had she been sitting there? Long enough to drink two large glasses of white wine, she realized.
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Nadia, remembering her manners.
‘Yes, somebody is sitting there?’
‘No. Nobody is sitting there. Yes. Yes, you can sit there.’
The man was insistent with his eye contact and held Nadia’s gaze. She swallowed, hard. She was a little bit drunk – she’d been so excited about the date that she hadn’t eaten properly since breakfast, so the booze had gone straight to her head. Something in the air shifted. The man stood in front of her, looking, for a beat too long. It snapped Nadia out of her daydream and into the present.
‘Are you waiting for somebody?’ he asked, settling in next to her.
‘I was,’ she said. She cleared her throat, aware that she sounded a little croaky. ‘But they can’t make it,’ she added, louder.
‘And now the lady drinks alone?’
‘And now the lady drinks alone,’ Nadia repeated. Wow. She had slurred that sentence a little – her speech was definitely impaired. She should go home. Or at least eat something.
‘That’s such a shame,’ he said, and Nadia smiled weakly. She could feel his eyes on her, but she wasn’t in the mood. She didn’t want to play cat-and-mouse games with a stranger at a bar – she wanted to mope and feel sorry for herself and lament how terrible all men were because they got your hopes up and then trashed them in the gutter.
‘This might seem very forward of me, but – do you want another drink? I have half an hour before my buddy gets here.’
Nadia looked at him – this man sat beside her, where her date should have been.
‘You’re asking me for a drink?’ she said. ‘Just like that?’
‘Just like what?’
‘You’re gonna sit down next to a woman you don’t know and offer to buy her a drink, like a Nora Ephron movie?’ Nadia wasn’t flirting, but there was a definite recklessness to her. Two drinks and one missed connection was enough to make her feel like she didn’t have to be polite, or coy, or nice. She didn’t have to contort to make herself likeable. She was mad as hell. After two drinks she’d gone from devastated to distraught to angry and now, she realized, she had zero fucks to give. All men were the same, she thought: destined to screw her over. What did she have to lose by entering into battle with this one?
‘I don’t know who that is, but yes. Call it a radical social experiment where one lone man tries to see if it’s possible to meet a woman without the aid of a dating app. Apparently in the olden days that’s how it used to happen, you know. Men and woman would just have a conversation, out, in public, and if they liked that conversation they’d keep having a conversation, until they decided they’d like another conversation on another day, and maybe another one after that. Experimental times.’
‘How do you not know who Nora Ephron is?’ Nadia replied. ‘She defined an era. Our whole generation grew up on her.’
‘I’ll have to educate myself,’ he said.
‘Start with You’ve Got Mail, and once you understand her genius, read Heartburn.’
‘You’ve Got Mail! I’ve heard of that!’
‘I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address …’
‘Pencils? You say that like it’s romantic.’
‘Oh, but it is,’ Nadia said. Was she being charming? She thought she was being acerbic, but the man’s eyes sparkled at her.
‘I’m Eddie,’ he said, reaching out a hand to shake hers.
‘Hello,’ she said.
Eddie smiled. ‘It would be typical for you to tell me your name now,’ he said.
‘Nadia.’
‘And what do you do, Nadia?’
‘I work in artificial intelligence.’
‘Beautiful and clever, I see.’
Nadia raised an eyebrow. ‘My robots have more original pick-up lines than that.’
‘I told