She’s back. After two days I was fairly certain I’d never see Pretty-Girl-From-The-Bridge again, but on day three here she is. This time she doesn’t hesitate uncertainly at the entrance, just marches in and sits at the bar, the same stool where she was before.

“We still haven’t got any appletinis,” I say.

She puts her purse down on the stool next to her and just gives me a look.

“Do you have boilermakers here?” she asks, her tone frosty.

“I assume someone does make the boiler.”

“It’s a pint of beer and a shot of whiskey,” she says. “For as much as you people drink you must have it, I just don’t know the name.”

“We call it ‘a shot and a pint,’” I say. “As much as we drink, we don’t dress it up with silly names.”

“Good,” she says. “Give me a — wait, I have to drive back. Shit.”

She puts her face in her hands, the massive rock on her ring finger glittering in the light.

“Just give me a pint of bitter,” she says through her hands. “Please.”

I pour her a pint. I don’t know what’s going on, but she clearly needs it more than I need her to leave the bar. Besides, it’s obvious that she doesn’t remember me from our first encounter. She doesn’t exactly seem the type to keep much that she’s thinking under wraps. I find Americans generally don’t.

“You sure about that?” I ask. “A whole pint?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she mutters into her hands, then takes them away from her face, leveling a look at me. “Look. If there was another pub within, I don’t know, thirty miles of here I promise you I’d be there right now instead of arguing with you over a pint of okay beer. But there’s not, because we are currently in the butthole of the north of England—”

Malcolm and Giles, both seated down the bar, raise their heads from their glasses and look at her.

“It’s a lovely butthole,” she says, giving them a half-wave.

I have to bite the inside of my lip to keep from smiling.

“—But I am currently in the middle of nowhere with a house full of people who don’t like me, and I want a drink, and at this time of night you’re pretty much my only hope, so how about you let me pay you for a pint?”

Malcolm whistles, and Giles starts clapping.

“Ought to be on the house for that,” says Malcolm.

“Hear, hear,” agrees Giles.

“What, today you suddenly agree on something? Sod off,” I tell them.

“Lass has well earned that pint,” Malcolm argues. “Right grumpy bastard like you, she deserves two. One for being here in the first place and another for even talking to the likes of you.”

“I agree,” the girl says. “If I have to talk you into letting me pay for a pint, it should be free.”

I don’t answer, but I do grab a glass and fill it. I even wipe the dripping bottom off and give her a coaster when I set it on the bar.

“Three pounds twe—”

“Oh come on, Liam, you cranky old hag,” Giles says. “For Christ’s sake.”

“Jesus,” I mutter under my breath. The girl takes a sip of her beer, and I’m fairly sure she’s laughing at me.

“Three pounds what?” she teases.

I give in.

“It’s on the house,” I finally say.

“He has got a heart,” Giles says.

“Going to cry, I am,” joins in Malcolm.

“Don’t you all start looking for handouts,” I tell them. “It’s a special occasion.”

“Course it is,” Giles says amiably. “We’re not pretty American girls who appear out of nowhere to give you hell.”

The girl takes another sip, but I can tell she’s blushing.

It looks good on her.

“You should introduce yourself,” Giles suggests. “Even an American could be a decent alternative to all those sheep.”

The girl gives him a look, but Giles winks at her. He’s somewhere in his late seventies, so he can get away with being utterly shameless around young women and they eat it up.

“Sorry about them,” I say to her. “Usually they’re too busy fighting over a church bell to bother the other customers. You caught them on a friendly day.”

“They’re fine,” she says, leaning her chin on one hand and looking down the bar. “It’s lovely that someone around here’s finally friendly.”

“You see that? People like it when you’re friendly, Liam,” Malcolm says, pointing one gnarled finger at me. “More flies with honey and all that.”

“So it’s Liam,” she says. “How many names have you got?”

“The standard number,” I say, leaning back against the bar behind me.

“Three?”

“Isn’t that the standard?”

“It feels like everyone I’ve met here has seventeen names plus four titles and some kind of numbering system,” she says.

“Sounds like you’re used to a posher crowd than you’ve found here,” I say.

She just rolls her eyes and takes another drink of her beer.

“How many names have you got?” I ask.

“Also three,” she says. “Are you asking what they are?”

“The first one, anyway,” I say. “Your middle name can wait until the second beer, I imagine.”

“It’s Frankie,” she says. “Do you shake hands, or if I offer will you look at me like I’m a particularly clever golden retriever?”

I hold out my hand, and she takes it, firmly. We shake once.

“Liam,” I say, unnecessarily. “And I’m afraid I don’t even know what the posh people you’ve been spending your time with expect instead of a hand shake.”

“I don’t know either,” she says, shrugging. “A curtsey? A salute? Maybe I’m supposed to kiss a ring? I’m clueless.”

“Is Frankie short for something?”

She nods, drinking. The beer’s half empty already, the ring on her finger sparkling every time she lifts the glass to her mouth. There’s a voice in the back of my head that’s warning me about it, saying don’t get too friendly with her, but for fuck’s sake we shook hands.

I’m allowed to shake hands with an engaged woman.

“Françoise,” she says, dragging it out and raising her eyebrows.

I lean back against the bar again, cross my arms, and take her in for a moment.

“You seem more like a Frankie than a Françoise,” I say.

Frankie laughs. It’s a big, loud American laugh that crinkles her eyes and shows all her teeth, and it gets the attention of Malcolm and Giles as well. I like it, though. Makes me smile despite myself.

“Thanks,” she finally says, her eyes dancing. “I think so too.”

* * *

She comes again two nights later, then two nights after that. Both times she sits on the same stool, orders a pint of bitter, rags on me for a moment, and then we end up talking until I’ve got to close the pub.

Turns out the enormous rock on her finger is from Alistair Winstead, Viscount of Downhamshire-on-Kyne and heir to the lands and estate. We talk about how nonsensical it is that the son of an Earl is a Viscount, at least until the Earl dies, at which point the Viscount becomes the Earl.

She rolls her eyes that it’s sexist women can’t inherit. I tell her I think the whole thing is bloody stupid and a relic of a time long past when people like Alistair at least had to ride into battle in exchange for owning half the county and lording over all the smallfolk.

“Well, it’s good for him he doesn’t have to ride into battle,” she says. “I don’t think he’d fare too well if he had to actually fight. Maybe if it were a battle of pointed jabs that subtly undermine your opponent.”

“I think those sorts of battles were fairly rare in the olden days,” I say.

“It’s just stupid,” she says. “I mean, I know I get to marry into insane wealth and that’s pretty cool, but the whole class system is...”

She shakes her head and drinks.

“It’s so weird. We don’t have it in the states,” she finishes.

Now I laugh.

“You’re telling me that America doesn’t have a class system,” I say.

“Not like this. People don’t have titles that they get from their fathers and insane castles and all the weird stuff that goes along with it.”

“Right. In America you’ve got the exact same thing, massive wealth and opportunity inherited, but you’ve all got to pretend that everyone in the upper class got their due to pure merit and... perseverance and bootstraps, or whatnot.”

“It’s less weird,” she says.

“It’s much harder to figure out,” I counter. “At least here I know when someone’s bound to be puffed-up arsehole.”

“Have you been to the states?”

I pause for a moment. Even though we’ve been talking nearly nonstop for a couple of nights now, I haven’t exactly told her my life story. I’ve told her that I’m a bartender who lives in a cottage on a sheep farm and that I grew up in the very northeast of England and that I prefer stouts to bitters, don’t like sweets, and think the monarchy is rubbish.

But I’ve not told her any of the real backstory: the band, the infamy, the drugs, the failed and repeated attempts at getting sober, the getting booted back to square one and having to reset my entire life.

“I lived in Los Angeles for a while, actually,” I admit carefully.

“You moved from Los Angeles to here?”

“Oi,” I say. “Nothing wrong with here.”

She just takes a drink, her eyes crinkling, because we both know I’ve spent at least half an hour complaining to her about nothing being open on Sundays and the fact that I can’t find proper kebab for a good thirty miles. Just because Shelton is good for me doesn’t mean I exactly like it.

“Yeah, I moved from Los Angeles to here. Bit different.”

“Because you prefer sheep to palm trees?”

“Life in Shelton has its own particular pace, you know,” I say, crossing my arms again. “Everyone in the village knows everyone else, the seasons change from spring to summer to autumn, it’s rather slower and not frantic the way cities can be.”

Frankie’s not buying it. I can tell.

“Was there a girl?” she asks, then points her left hand. The one with the Viscount’s rock on it. “No. You’re in witness protection because you saw something. This is the perfect place.”

“No girl, no witness protection,” I say slowly.

Fuck it. Just tell her the truth. You don’t have to tell her all of it.

“There was a band, though,” I say. “We had an album that did all right, moved to Los Angeles to record another, but then it didn’t work out, so I came back here to get away.”

“What band?”

“Rhinoceros,” I lie. It’s not a big lie. Gavin and I were in a band called that, it just wasn’t the band.

“Never heard of it,” she says.

“That’s why I’m here.”

“What did you play? Did you sing?”

“Drums,” I say, shaking my head.

She gives me a long, slow look, her chin on her hand, and even though I glance away I swear I can feel the heat of it bubbling up from my toes. I don’t mind the way she looks at me. Despite the big, ugly ring on her finger, I don’t mind it at all.

Behave, you fucking lout, I tell myself.

Behave how? You’re talking. You’re not doing a thing.

I suppose I’m pretending that imagining what Frankie might look like undressed is not doing a thing.

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” she finally says. “I just thought you were a regular bloke, I guess.”

“I am a regular bloke. Came back here to tend bar, didn’t I?”

“Do you own the Hound’s Ears? With your rock star money? Is that why you were such an asshole at first, because no one could fire you?” Frankie teases.

I just grin.

“Musicians make rather less than you’re imagining,” I say. “Unless they’re absolutely massive, that is. But most are the starving artist type.”

I was massive, of course. I had a Ferrari and a Maserati and I totaled them both. I owned the penthouse suite of a building right on the Sunset Strip, and it nearly burned down when I was high as a kite and tried to make a flamethrower from a lighter and a can of hairspray indoors.

It’s not exactly true that the band didn’t work out. Dirtshine, the band, is fine. Gavin, Trent, and Darcy — the other three — just finished a massive tour and they’re probably about to start recording again.

It’s me. I’m the problem. I was the junkie who couldn’t get clean, the absolute disaster of a human who tore through everyone else like a wrecking ball.

And I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand that Gavin, my best friend since grade school, could kick heroin and I couldn’t; I couldn’t stand that he had a girlfriend; I couldn’t stand that he and Trent and Darcy could all go on with their lives while I was stuck back in the murky swamp waters of addiction.

It took me another year. It took me three tries at rehab. I had to go back home, live with my mum and fail again and again.

I had to nearly jump in front of a train, from a bridge, before I could get my life right.

I had to move here, to Shelton, where I didn’t know anyone and where the biggest fights are over church bells. Easier to stay clean if you haven’t got your old crowd texting you daily and asking if you want to come over, getting angry if you say no.

It’s been a long fucking time, it has. Two years since the overdose, and it’s only now that I think this tunnel might have a light at the end.

“Do you like it better here?” she asks.

“It’s apples and oranges, really,” I say, because the two things are fucking incomparable. I’m no longer the Liam who lived in Los Angeles, and good riddance, though I do miss it. I miss the excitement, I miss the verve, and more than anything I miss the band.

But I don’t miss that Liam. Not even a little.

Really.

“For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine you there,” she says. “Or anywhere in the states. New York maybe.”

“Why’s that?”

Frankie laughs. Outside, the church bell chimes eleven, and she sighs, then finishes the last few sips of her beer.

“Americans are friendlier,” she teases. “We have great customer service. Sometimes I’ll just smile at a person on the street for absolutely no reason.”

She puts her jacket back on with a wiggle, and even though I try not to, I watch it. And I store it for later use.

“Plus, our bars are open past eleven,” she says, grabbing her purse.

“See you again in a few?” I ask, hopefully. Too hopefully. Like a fucking puppy dog.

“I’m sure I’ll need a drink again,” she says, smiling. “Take care, Liam.”

Like that, she’s gone, drifting out of the pub with everyone else who’s stayed until the last bell, and I’m left holding an empty pint glass, thinking of a smile and a laugh and how her hair would feel in my hands. What she’d sound like if I kissed the spot on her neck just below her ear.

But I’m also thinking of Alistair, the fucking Viscount of fucking Downhamshire-on-Kyne, the prat, and I know I’m free to think about whatever I want, but it’ll all come to nothing.

Old Liam wouldn’t give a fuck about a fiancé, even a lordly one.

But he was an arsehole, and even though it’s a little new and strange, I do give a fuck, no matter how much I don’t want to.