Unfortunately, the display on the card reader soon told her why not. Card declined, insufficient funds.

Emily frowned. Impossible. She definitely had money in that account; she hadn’t been paid yet, but the rent wasn’t due until next week.

A Tesco employee hovered nearby. “Do you need some help?”

“No, no.” Emily grinned. “All good, just used the wrong card, that’s all. I won’t be a sec.”

She pulled her phone out of her bag and brought up her banking app. Her account details appeared. Shit. The rent came out this week, not next week. It had bounced, which meant she had yet again hit her overdraft limit and would have to apply for her third extension in as many months. She would be laughed out of the bank.

“You sure you don’t need help?” asked the shop assistant again.

“Yes, fine, no problem.” Emily went to pull out her credit card and remembered that it had been canceled due to irregular payments. No, no, no. She briefly considered running out of the shop without paying but thought better of it.

Blushing, she beckoned the Tesco lady over. “Actually, I do have a bit of a problem. This is so embarrassing, but I’ve left my card at home. I must have picked up my old one by mistake. So annoying—they look exactly the same!”

The woman peered at her over the top of her glasses. She was nobody’s fool. “You can go home and get it,” she said. “We’ll keep your shopping here until you get back.”

“Well, no. I live quite far away so that’s not really … Look, can I just take a couple of things and leave the rest?”

Nobody’s Fool rolled her eyes. Without saying a word, she pushed a couple of buttons on the screen and swiped her staff clearance card, erasing Emily’s shopping list and bringing up the start page once more.

“Thanks. Sorry.” Emily paid for the Breezers, milk, and eggs, and watched as her extravagances were taken away.

Outside on the street, she bit her nails. Her pay would come in next week, but it would only just cover the missed rent, so there would be nothing left for food or travel. Or bills. She thought of the overdue electricity reminder taped to the fridge.

Things were not looking good. Nobody’s Fool was right; she needed help.

* * *

Rather than get straight on the Tube, Emily took the side streets off Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square down to the river. The smoggy London air was far from fresh, but it beat the vacuum of the underground and she needed a clear head.

On the Golden Jubilee Bridge, she placed her shopping bag at her feet and pulled her phone out of her pocket. Underneath, the Thames slid by, brown and soupy. Her thumb hovered over her mother’s number. Did she really have the nerve to call? Was she that desperate?

“I have had enough!” Juliet had shrieked during Emily’s last visit. “You can’t keep doing this! You can’t just disappear for months on end, no phone calls, no emails, nothing, and then show up out of nowhere asking for money.” Afterward, the two of them had sat in stunned silence, neither knowing how to bridge the gap. Juliet, as always, was the first to try. “I’m sorry for raising my voice,” she said, her face drawn. “But your father and I worry so much about you, and we’re afraid that … Look, it would just be lovely to hear from you because you’d like to say hello, and not just because you want something.”

That had been Emily’s cue to be gracious, conciliatory. Instead she chose the lowest road. “I’m sorry I’m such a massive disappointment to you guys,” she said, “but you were the ones who adopted a kid from fuck knows where. If you wanted perfection then maybe you should’ve left me where I was.”

Juliet had recoiled as if slapped. “That is not fair, Emily. And you know it.”

Emily did know it, but there was a spark of truth in what she’d said. Plus, she always got a kick out of seeing her saintly mother snap. What, no jolly silver lining for me? Oh, how sad. This time, though, the look on Juliet’s face had been somewhat less satisfying.

After a few moments, Emily replaced the phone in her bag. The river stretched out beneath her, full and fat. Lazy waves licked the cold stone walls and slapped the undersides of party boats, and Emily had a fleeting urge to throw herself in. Life just felt … too big. She was supposedly an adult, but for some reason she struggled to deal with, well, anything really. She didn’t understand her rental agreements. Tax returns were like cryptic crosswords to her. Conversations about mortgages and small-business loans (very rare in her life, but they did crop up occasionally) might as well have been in Urdu for all the sense they made to her. She seemed to spend most of her days feeling baffled and overwhelmed. Which, she mused, perhaps explained why she now found herself broke and unemployed, standing alone on a bridge with only half her shopping.

Sighing heavily, she picked up her bag and turned away from the water, heading instead for home.

* * *

As usual, the door of Emily’s building got stuck on the bulging carpet, and she was forced to squeeze her body sideways through the gap. Her cardigan snagged on the latch, which pulled a small hole in the weave. “Crap,” she muttered, trying unsuccessfully to shove the door shut again. She gave it a kick. The doorknob fell off.

She trudged up the stairs, brushing a film of dust off the bannister with her sleeve. Inside the flat, the ever-present smell of curry, courtesy of the Indian restaurant below, was today enriched by an acrid tang of burned toast. Spencer must be cooking.

She poked her head into the kitchen, expecting to find her flatmate in his favorite spot at the table, bent over a packet of tobacco and some rolling papers. He wasn’t, but the evidence suggested he’d only just left. An ashtray full of roll-up stubs smoldered on the table, and a thin haze of smoke hung in the air. A tub of margarine sat lidless and sweaty next to greasy plates and, in the corner, takeout boxes spilled from the bin.

Curling her lip in disgust, Emily returned the margarine to the fridge, opened a window, and then picked her way over to the countertop to search for a clean glass—one that didn’t have a small pool of alcohol at the bottom. Something caught her eye as she rummaged. Among the debris was an oil-spattered note.

Guess what, it said in Spencer’s lazy scrawl, rent bounced again, landlord lost his shit. We’ve got four weeks.

Emily sat at the table and cradled her head in both hands. She racked her brains, running through a mental list of friends who might have a spare room or even a sofa she could crash on for a few weeks but, surprisingly, she came up with nothing.

How is that even possible? I have friends, don’t I?

She did, but many of them had thrown in the towel and moved away from London to get married and have kids. Now they were all scattered across the country, moving on with their lives, sending invitations to events that made absolutely no sense to her. Tupperware parties. Gender-reveal parties. She had no idea what these things even meant. Whenever she’d made the effort to visit, she’d found that she had nothing to say, nothing to contribute. It was as if they’d all flown off to the moon and left her behind.

Of the friends who had stuck around, she could only think of two who might have had space for her, but Louise had sublet her room while she was away on tour and Rhea’s father had just died, so the time probably wasn’t the right time to ask for favors. That, and Rhea’s place was like a drug den. The last time Emily had stayed over she’d woken up in the living room at 8 A.M., hungover as fuck, surrounded by bearded men and bong smoke. She hadn’t the courage to ask who they were or where they’d come from, so she’d fronted it out, sitting up and pretending everything was normal. The TV had been on, spitting out news story after gruesome news story, the men all staring with glassy eyes at grim accounts of domestic violence and mass shootings, child abuse and murders, and she’d sat and watched with them for over half an hour before she’d felt brave enough to stand up and leave the room.

And then Rhea had appeared, gray-faced and groggy, insisting that Emily come with her to her niece’s second birthday party. “Please, Em,” she’d pleaded, “I can’t face it on my own.” So, off they’d trudged to a clean white house in Putney where cake-faced kids literally ran rings around them. Emily had never felt so dirty in all her life. That was three years ago, and she hadn’t been back to Rhea’s house since.