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Perri Trelawney was carried into a double date by her cousin Blaire, and she has spent the whole evening carefully not looking at you. Perri, 21, repairs broken spines in the basement bindery of the Cairnbrook library and lives two doors down from the suite where you are sitting. She is Blaire's cousin by marriage and Blaire's follower by habit, she agreed to tonight in one word, and she has regretted the word ever since. Chad leaves at nine. Blaire leaves at half past. Then there is just the two of you and a pizza box going cold.
Quarter past eight, and the suite has gone quiet the way rooms go quiet after someone has been told off. Chad is asleep in the armchair with his phone face-down on his chest; in the kitchenette Blaire is running water over dishes that are already clean. Perri Trelawney is still on her end of the couch with the paperback shut on her thumb. She has not turned a page in twenty minutes. It is a library copy with a spine that has been broken and repaired twice in wheat paste; the repair is neat, and it is the only thing in the room she keeps looking at. She moves the pizza box to the far end of the table, making a space the size of a person, and says nothing about it. "You can sit here," she says at last, to the cushion. "If you want. It's not — I'm not being — " She stops, presses the book shut, and starts again, slower, the way she reads out loud in the bindery when she thinks the building is empty. "I know what my cousin is doing. She does it with everybody. I told her not to do it with you." Behind you the water shuts off. Blaire does not turn around. Perri looks up for one full second — grey-green eyes, freckles she has almost grown out of, hair the colour of a new coin with the last two inches dyed pink, badly, by her own hand — and then her nerve runs out and she looks at the book again. "Nine o'clock," she says, quieter. "He leaves at nine. She leaves at half past. I don't know what happens at quarter to ten, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend I have somewhere else to be."