I’ve got my back turned when off in the corner, there’s a minor crash, a thump, and then a scuffle, and I briefly close my eyes.

“Now you’ve gone and done it, haven’t you?” one voice asks.

“What, knocked over a bar table? I’m a right scoundrel,” the other answers.

For fuck’s sake, they’re at it again, but it’s nothing new. I hold the second pint glass under the tap and wait for it to fill, listening to Giles and Malcolm fussing at each other like two old hens.

“The thing is broken now,” Giles is saying. “That’s you. First you cock up the church bell so badly God himself couldn’t tell time from it, now you’re wrecking the pub, liable to get us both booted out—”

“Oh, do shut up, you pompous arsehole,” Malcolm says. “You can’t stand that I’ve got this thing right and you’ve got it wrong, so you went all about town changing the clocks just to prove that I’m some sort of imbecile, but it won’t work because I’ve bloody figured it out, you damn fool.”

I turn around, a pint of bitter in each hand, and set them dripping on the bar.

“Tab?” Arthur asks.

“Right,” I confirm.

“You’re completely mad,” Giles shouts.

Now I can see them, each one gray-haired, arms crossed, standing on either side of a toppled bar table. There’s a dartboard behind them and the chalkboard shows that apparently, they’ve abandoned a game to have their weekly fight about whether the church bell in the village of Shelton strikes the hour at exactly the right time.

It’s a bloody stupid fight, and I’ve had to hear it for going on six months now. That’s twenty-four times I’ve listened to two old bats going on about a stupid bell, and I’m just about finished with it.

I turn my back to them, wipe my hands on the bar towel, note the two pints on Arthur’s tab.

“I’m not mad, you’re mad,” Malcolm’s going on. “You’re a raving looney if you think that changing the bell’s ring every other week is getting anyone in Shelton to anything on—”

I reach below the bar and grab a dart, tossing it once in my hand. Arthur, his pint to his lips, gives me a very serious look and nods once.

“—Time, which is the foremost and only job of a church bell—”

I let it fly, and it lands with a dull thunk in a dartboard about four feet to the left of Malcolm’s head. Thirteen, not a bad score from halfway across the pub.

Malcolm and Giles stop their arguing and both turn to me, pints in hand.

“That’ll do,” I call.

“You could have bloody well killed a man,” Giles says, the same thing he says every time I stop their fights this way.

“Haven’t yet.”

“One of these days that thing is going to slip and get one of us right in the temple—”

“The two of you can either stay here and end your discussion of the sodding church bell or you can go home,” I cut him off.

Both men are perfectly stone-faced, an expression I’m well familiar with. I’m fairly sure that Giles’ wife has her bridge club over tonight, and Malcolm’s wife has been on him lately about the state of their roof, so they’re both much happier here.

I tend bar nights at the only pub in a village with less than a thousand people. I know everyone’s business, whether I’m interested or not.

Mostly, I’m not.

“You’re a bloody-minded dictator,” Giles calls amiably.

“You’re a worthless drunk,” I call back.

They both set their pints on another table, then work together to right the one they knocked over. Teamwork. Truly fucking beautiful, really.

I turn back to the boring part of my job: wash a few glasses, wipe down the shiny, deep mahogany bar just for good measure, although it’s so dark inside the Hound’s Ears that it hardly matters. The place only has windows on the front, being a brick row building squashed between two other shops directly in the center of Shelton. The ceilings are low, the wood is all dark, the booths and armchairs are all leather, and the whole place feels a bit warren-like.

All properly as it should be.

The bells on the front door sound again and I glance around the place, wondering who’s left. The faster I can clear off their table, the faster I’ll be able to close once eleven o’clock rolls around.

But no one’s left, it’s someone new. A girl. Standing just inside the door and looking around at the place a bit uncertainly, adjusting her purse strap on her shoulder.

She looks bloody familiar. I don’t know her, but I’ve got the gnawing suspicion that she and I have met before. And when you’re barely six months off heroin, that’s a bad feeling indeed.

So of course, she walks in, shrugging a scarf from around her neck, her eyes crawling up the brick walls stuffed with knick-knacks. And of course, she finally spots me, behind the bar, and even though I’m leaning against the counter and pretending to watch the football highlights, all my attention’s on her.

The way she stops. Blinks. The way Arthur and his mate Paul, sitting at the bar, both blatantly turn their heads and look at her before turning back to their beers.

The way I want to tell them both eyes fucking forward, you louts.

Finally, she steps up in front of me, and my heart fucking hammers in my chest. She’s pretty, prettier than anyone else I’ve come across in ages, and I’ve got the sinking feeling that she might know me even though I still can’t place her.

“Yeah?” I ask.

“Is this where I order?”

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

The moment she opens her mouth I know exactly who she fucking is. Frankly, I was hoping to never see her again.

“It’s the bar, isn’t it?” I ask.

She smiles. It’s just like a fucking American girl to pretend I’m being polite when I’m not.

“I’m just never quite sure,” she says with a little laugh. “Everywhere seems to have slightly different rules, you know? I’ve just started asking so I don’t offend anyone.”

It’s the girl from the bridge.

That night.

That girl.

The one who stopped her car a year ago, the one who fucking talked me off a ledge and watched while I walked away.

Someone who saw me at my lowest point — well, all right, one of the lowest points, there’s been a fair few — and who I really fucking hoped I’d never see again, because the only thing worse than being seen like that is being seen like that by a pretty girl.

She blinks, and she’s got big hazel eyes framed with long lashes, some kind of eye makeup on but fuck me if I know what, but I know one thing: she’s trying to charm me by being friendly.

And it’s working. She’s even prettier now, in the pub, than on the verge of tears last year and since I’m stone-cold sober at the moment, I’m in far better shape to appreciate such.

Still doesn’t mean I fucking want her here. I don’t think she recognizes me and I’d prefer she move on before she does.

“Right, it’s the bar, you order here,” I say. I don’t move from where I’m leaning, and I don’t uncross my arms. “But I’m fresh out of cosmopolitans, appletinis, lemon drops, or anything a girl could drink enough of to start making a scene, so if that’s what you’re looking for I recommend you look elsewhere.”

Just leave. Please just leave.

Of course she doesn’t. She laughs. As if I was joking.

“This crowd drink you out of appletinis?” she asks, glancing around at the scattered old men each individually nursing a pint in silence.

I look back at the football highlights on the telly.

“Right.”

“What do you have?”

“Beer, cider, whiskey, gin. It’s a pub, love.”

“Then give me a pub beer.”

“We’ve got bitter and stout, and none of that shite with an orange slice. American girls usually don’t like it.”

She hops up onto a bar stool, flops her purse onto the stool next to her, and wriggles out of her jacket, pushing her hand through her curly hair.

It’s one hell of a wriggle. It’s a wriggle to make a man forget he wants this nosy, pushy American to leave his pub.

“I’ll take a pint of bitter,” she says.

“You sure?”

She pauses, gives me a quick, annoyed glance up and down.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” she says. “Are you going to let me exchange money for beer or what?”

I could refuse, of course. I can refuse to serve anyone for any reason, but as much as I really want her to leave I also don’t, because she’s fucking pretty, she’s giving it right back to me, and maybe she’ll wriggle back into her jacket.

I pour her the beer, put it down in front of her.

“Three pounds twenty,” I say. She hands me a five pound note, and as I’m handing her change back, something on her left hand catches the light.

It’s a diamond ring.

No: it’s a diamond ring the size of a small lorry. Fucking wonder that she can lift her hand with that thing on it. Clearly someone else has been enticed by her wiggle, someone with quite a lot of money and a need to show it off.

That’s all it is, obviously. A ring that can be seen from orbit fucking smacks of insecurity and the desire to impress one’s friends more than it does of love, right?

She takes a sip, watching me, and I realize I haven’t moved. That I’m still standing in front of her, like I’m expecting to converse or something.

“It’s no appletini, but it’s not bad,” she says.

I nod once.

“I’ll tell the brewers,” I say, stepping away from the bar. “They’ll be positively chuffed to hear a good review from some American bird.”

I turn away before she can respond, hitting a key on the till just for the hell of it. When I glance back she’s got her chin on one hand, watching the football highlights with the same level of moderate disinterest as everyone else in the pub.

I can’t keep looking at her, and for fuck’s sake I can’t keep talking to her, so I do a round of the pub, picking up glasses and plates and washing them, getting ready to close. I steadfastly ignore her for the next thirty minutes.

Finally, I glance over again. Sheer habit to see if she needs another drink, but she’s blessedly gone, the bells on the door ringing just as I notice.

Something inside me turns over. I’m not exactly sure what it is, and given that I’m not quite used to this sort of shit at the moment, I don’t bother to identify it. I just know that the girl from the bridge showed up, didn’t recognize me, had a pint, left, and I felt some kind of way about it.

“Because it’s three minutes off, you knob!” Giles says, his voice suddenly loud at the other end of the pub.

“You’re a useless imbecile, this watch was given to me by my father, rest his soul, from his time in the Royal Air—”

“THAT’S ALL!” I shout, and they both turn, looking at me guiltily.

I glare. They go back to drinking together.

* * *

It’s nearing 11:45 when I get home. Not late by my old standards — barely midday by my old standards — but most people in Shelton Village have probably been asleep for hours now.

I toss my keys on the table, my coat on a hook, turn the thermostat up a couple of degrees. It’s why I took this flat in the first place, because everything else I looked at in the countryside at least four hours away from Montford Wye had sodding woodstoves for heating.

Woodstoves.

Admittedly, my budget was quite low and my references quite bad and I’m sure central heating would have been easy to come by otherwise, but it did make my decision easy, and now I live in a two-room house, likely two hundred years old, adjacent to a field full of sheep.

It’s not uncommon that I wake up in the morning to a sheep staring in my bedroom window, chewing away at something, as if it thinks I ought to have been up hours ago.

I sit in an armchair, take a deep breath, and try not to think about the girl at the bar, who was also the girl from the bridge. I don’t think about her laughing hazel eyes, the freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks, or the surprising swell of her chest against a small waist as she got out of her jacket.

And I certainly don’t think about the enormous rock on her finger.

I sigh, stand, check the time. Still not midnight yet, and I did promise myself I’d start today. I don’t fucking want to. Of course I don’t want to, because I’ve been an absolute cock to more than a few people in my life, and it’s not as if apologizing has ever been my strong suit.

But I’ve got to. Useless as I found NA and AA and all those bloody recovery acronyms, in among their sanctimonious bullshit were a few good ideas, and apologizing to people I fucked over was probably one of them.

At least Harry, my nominal sponsor who isn’t exactly aware of my attitude on said programs, agreed.

So, I put the kettle on, sigh again, and get out the list that I wrote down as a procrastination tactic. It’s a long list, made up entirely of people who I’m sure would rather not talk to me. I look at the clock again. Almost midnight, but Los Angeles is eight hours behind Britain, making it barely four in the afternoon there, so that’s no good as an excuse.

The kettle whistles. I make tea while I try to figure out what the hell I’m going to say to him when I call, because sorry doesn’t cover as much as I’d like. Besides which, I’m sure I don’t even remember all I’ve got to be sorry for.

I put the tea on the table, consider adding a bit of whiskey to it. Not even that much, half a shot maybe. Enough to take the edge off and make this easier, but I don’t, because drinking while apologizing to people for things to did to them while high rather blunts the point.

Have a drink when you’re done, I tell myself. Then it’s fine. You were a junkie, not an alcoholic.

I look at the list, sit down, wonder if I should add American Girl from the Bridge/Pub to it.

And then I pick up my phone, even though I don’t want to, and I call my former best friend and my old bandmate Gavin before I can talk myself out of it.