She looked down at what she was wearing. A denim shirt with sleeves rolled halfway up her forearms and jeans and wedge-heeled shoes, none of which she wore in her actual life. She had goose-bumps from the cold, and clearly wasn’t dressed to be outside for long.

There were two rings on her ring finger. Her old sapphire engagement ring was there – the same one she had taken off, through trembles and tears, over a year ago – accompanied by a simple silver wedding band.

Crackers.

She was wearing a watch. Not a digital one, in this life. An elegant, slender analogue one, with Roman numerals. It was about a minute after midnight.

How is this happening?

Her hands were smoother in this life. Maybe she used hand cream. Her nails shone with clear polish. There was some comfort in seeing the familiar small mole on her left hand.

Footsteps crunched on gravel. Someone was heading towards her down the driveway. A man, visible from the light of the pub windows and the solitary streetlamp. A man with rosy cheeks and grey Dickensian whiskers and a wax jacket. A Toby jug made flesh. He seemed, from his overly careful gait, to be slightly drunk.

‘Goodnight, Nora. I’ll be back on Friday. For the folk singer. Dan said he’s a good one.’

In this life she probably knew the man’s name. ‘Right. Yes, of course. Friday. It should be a great night.’

At least her voice sounded like her. She watched as the man crossed the road, looking left and right a few times despite the clear absence of traffic, and disappearing down a lane between the cottages.

It was really happening. This was actually it. This was the pub life. This was the dream made reality.

‘This is so very weird,’ she said into the night. ‘So. Very. Weird.’

A group of three left the pub then too. Two women and a man. They smiled at Nora as they walked past.

‘We’ll win next time,’ one of the women said.

‘Yes,’ replied Nora. ‘There’s always a next time.’

She walked up to the pub and peeked through the window. It seemed empty inside, but the lights were still on. That group must have been the last to leave.

The pub looked very inviting. Warm and characterful. Small tables and timber beams and a wagon wheel attached to a wall. A rich red carpet and a wood-panelled bar full of an impressive array of beer pumps.

She stepped away from the window and saw a sign just beyond the pub, past where the pavement became grass.

Quickly, she trotted over and read what it said.

LITTLEWORTH

Welcomes Careful Drivers

Then she noticed in the top centre of the sign a little coat of arms around which orbited the words Oxfordshire County Council.

‘We did it,’ she whispered into the country air. ‘We actually did it.’

This was the dream Dan had first mentioned to her while walking by the Seine in Paris, eating macarons they had bought on the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

A dream not of Paris but of rural England, where they would live together.

A pub in the Oxfordshire countryside.

When Nora’s mum’s cancer aggressively returned, reaching her lymph nodes and rapidly colonising her body, that dream was put on hold and Dan moved with her from London back to Bedford. Her mum had known of their engagement and had planned to stay alive long enough for the wedding. She had died four months too soon.

Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the life. Maybe this was first-time lucky, or second-time lucky.

She allowed herself an apprehensive smile.

She walked back along the path and crunched over the gravel, heading towards the side door the drunken, whiskery man in the wax jacket had recently departed from. She took a deep breath and stepped inside.

It was warm.

And quiet.

She was in some kind of hallway or corridor. Terracotta floor tiles. Low wood panelling and, above, wallpaper full of illustrations of sycamore leaves.

She walked down the little corridor and into the main pub area which she had peeked at through the window. She jumped as a cat appeared out of nowhere.

An elegant, angular chocolate Burmese purring away. She bent down and stroked it and looked at the engraved name on the disc attached to the collar. Voltaire.

A different cat, with the same name. Unlike her dear beloved ginger tabby, she doubted this Voltaire was a rescue. The cat began to purr. ‘Hello, Volts Number Two. You seem happy here. Are we all as happy as you?’

The cat purred a possible affirmation and rubbed his head against Nora’s leg. She picked him up and went over to the bar. There was a row of craft beers on the pumps, stouts and ciders and pale ales and IPAs. Vicar’s Favourite. Lost and Found. Miss Marple. Sleeping Lemons. Broken Dream.

There was a charity tin on the bar for Butterfly Conservation.

She heard the sound of clinking glass. As if a dishwasher was being filled. Nora felt anxiety constrict her chest. A familiar sensation. Then a spindly twenty-something man in a baggy rugby top popped up from behind the bar, hardly giving any attention to Nora as he gathered the last remaining used glasses and put them in the dishwasher. He switched it on then pulled down his coat from a hook, put it on and took out some car keys.

‘Bye, Nora. I’ve done the chairs and wiped all the tables. Dishwasher’s on.’

‘Ah, thanks.’

‘Till Thursday.’

‘Yes,’ Nora said, feeling like a spy about to have her cover blown. ‘See you.’

A moment after the man left, she heard footsteps rising up from somewhere below, heading across the tiles she had just walked down, coming from the back of the pub. And then he was there.

He looked different.

The beard had gone, and there were more wrinkles around his eyes, dark circles. He had a nearly finished pint of dark beer in his hand. He still looked a bit like a TV vet, just a few more series down the line.

‘Dan,’ she said, as if he was something that needed identifying. Like a rabbit by the road. ‘I just want to say I am so proud of you. So proud of us.’

He looked at her, blankly. ‘Was just turning the chiller units off. Got to clean the lines tomorrow. We’ve left it a fortnight.’

Nora had no idea what he was talking about. She stroked the cat. ‘Right. Yes. Of course. The lines.’

Her husband – for in this life, that was who he was – looked around at all the tables and upside-down chairs. He was wearing a faded Jaws T-shirt. ‘Have Blake and Sophie gone home?’

Nora hesitated. She sensed he was talking about people who worked for them. The young man in the baggy rugby top was presumably Blake. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around.

‘Yes,’ she said, trying to sound natural despite the fundamental bizarreness of the circumstances. ‘I think they have. They were pretty on top of things.’

‘Cool.’

She remembered buying him the Jaws T-shirt on his twenty-sixth birthday. Ten years previously.

‘The answers tonight were something else. One of the teams – the one Pete and Jolie were on – thought Maradona painted the Sistine ceiling.’

Nora nodded and stroked Volts Number Two. As if she had any idea who on earth Pete and Jolie were.

‘To be fair, it was a tricky one tonight. Might take them from another website next time. I mean, who actually knows the name of the highest mountain in the Kara-whatsit range?’

‘Karakoram?’ Nora asked. ‘That would be K2.’

‘Well, obviously you know,’ he said, a little too abruptly. A little too tipsily. ‘It’s the kind of thing you would know. Because while most people were into rock music you were into actual rocks and stuff.’

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I was literally in a band.’

A band, she remembered then, that Dan had hated her being in.