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Then he walked onto the stage and introduced her before she could argue. Ashley hated him.

Seconds later, she was sitting on a stool under a spotlight that seemed unnecessarily bright for a room this small. She adjusted the microphone.

‘Hi.’ The microphone squealed. ‘Great start.’

A few people laughed.

Ashley stared at a point above everyone’s heads. That was usually the trick. Not looking directly at people. People got weird when they realised they were being perceived.

She played the first chord of ‘Blurry Picture’. It wasn’t her best, but she always opened with it. It existed mainly to get her through the first three minutes without fleeing.

Halfway through the second verse, she accidentally glanced towards Molly’s table once more.

Molly was watching intently. Ashley immediately looked somewhere else. The wall. The amp. Literally anything.

She finished the song. People clapped, including Molly. Unfortunately, Molly appeared to be keeping her earlier promise about enthusiasm.

‘WOO!’

Ashley nearly dropped her pick. A few people laughed. Molly looked entirely unapologetic.

Ashley shook her head and moved onto the next song. The second song went better, ‘True Blue’. The third, ‘Hole in the Fabric’, better still.

Something always happened around that point. Her brain eventually got bored of being scared. She stopped thinking about whether people liked the songs and started playing them.

When she looked up again, she forgot not to look at Molly.

Molly smiled. Ashley immediately forgot a lyric. There was a long pause. Someone coughed. Ashley found the line again.

By the fourth song, Ashley had developed a system. Look everywhere except Table Three. Table Three contained problems.

The set finished twenty minutes later. People clapped. It sounded like they meant it.

Ashley stood up awkwardly.

‘Thanks for coming.’ She paused. ‘All twelve of you.’

That got a laugh.

Then she escaped. Or attempted to. She made it approximately six feet off the stage before hearing someone say, ‘You were good.’

Ashley turned. Molly was standing there with her flatmate, a guy with a scruff of beard and a man-bun, which Ashley had believed was aesthetically behind them as a culture. After she’d written him off, she looked at Molly.

Molly looked like she knew what Ashley was feeling, like she knew what was going to happen, like she wasn’t afraid.

But Ashley was very, very afraid of Molly.

Ten

Now

The dress was a mistake.

It was emerald green silk, sitting just above the knee, a dress for a woman who ate expensive meals in Soho, not some currently unemployed actress whose stomach was tapdancing. It required posture. Molly didn’t have posture. She considered the spine’s natural straight line as more of a suggestion.

Molly stopped outside the restaurant. The brass sign was polished. The place sat on a cobblestone street, tucked away. It was so fancy it didn’t want the plebs to know it existed.

‘You’re an actress,’ Molly said to herself. She pulled at the silk on her hip. ‘You can pretend to have dinner with your ex.’