The pub sits in its dead hours—that pocket between lunch and evening where the only sounds are the cooler humming behind me and Old Reg breathing over his usual pint. Bev's out back counting bottles by hand because she doesn't trust the inventory app I installed three months ago.
I'm alone with a bar cloth and a surface that's already clean, wiping it again because my hands need somewhere to be.
My phone buzzes against the wood. Mum. I consider letting it go—I've been letting a lot of things go lately, calls and alarms and the general concept of breakfast—but my thumb swipes before my brain can weigh in.
"Odette." Not a greeting. No warm-up, no careful word arrangement—none of the diplomatic tone she's been using since I moved here, the one where every sentence sounds like it's been vetted by a legal team specialising in maternal relations. Just my name, flat and bare.
"Hi, Mum." I lean my hip against the bar, already bracing for whatever this conversation is going to become.
"I'm not doing the dance," she says. "The one where I ask how you are and you say fine and I pretend to believe you, and we both hang up feeling worse. I'm done with it."
My hand stills on the bar cloth. Across the room, Old Reg glances up from his pint and then back down with the efficient discretion you only get when you've survived two wars, four marriages, and the wisdom to know when a conversation isn't yours.
"Something is wrong," she says—not a question, not even close. "I've known for weeks, Odette." I open my mouth to deny it, but she's faster.
"Don't." Quiet, final. "Your voice has changed. There's something underneath it that wasn't there before—something heavy, something you're carrying—and a mother hears these things even when her daughter is three hundred miles away pretending."
The afternoon light cuts a pale stripe across the floorboards, catching the dust I should have swept an hour ago. Old Reg's glass catches the same light, amber and still.
"I'm fine." The word leaves my mouth on autopilot—it's a reflex so practised it doesn't require my participation. "I'm managing."
"Managing isn't living." Her voice drops, rougher now, the veneer gone. "You've been managing since the day you left London in your wedding dress, and managing is what you do when you've given up on everything else."
My eyes close. The bar is cool against my palm and I press into it—the grain of the wood, the faint sticky patch near the tap I keep missing.
"Come home," she says, and my jaw tightens because it's not that simple, but she doesn't know that.
"Mum—" But she cuts me off before I can build the wall.
"Not for the wedding. I understand about the wedding. I won't mention it, I swear on your grandmother's grave and your father's reading glasses and whatever else you need me to swear on." Oh, now, that's serious Mum.
Somewhere out back, Bev drops something metallic and swears with a creativity that could earn its own arts council grant. I almost smile, but my mouth won't quite listen to me.
"I just want to see my daughter," Mum says, and there’s no strategy, no angle. "You don't have to explain anything." She presses on before I can form the refusal. "Don't have to talk about whatever happened. You just need to come home and sit at my kitchen table and let someone take care of you for one day."
My throat works around three different answers, none of which survive the climb past my teeth. The kitchen table—yellow formica with the burn mark from when I was fourteen and tried crêpes suzette after too much Julia Child.
My mother sat across that table when I told her I was leaving uni, when I told her I was moving in with Liam, when I told her I was getting married. Every catastrophe of my life has been debriefed there—it's practically a licensed therapist with a fruit bowl.
"The wedding is next week," I say, which isn't a yes or a no—it's a door held open a crack to see what shape the air is on the other side.
"Yes, it is." She doesn't flinch. "And you don't have to go anywhere near it. We'll stay in the house, the two of us, and the rest of the world can do whatever it wants outside the front door."
Silence. My mouth opens, closes—I must look like a fish being asked to comment on philosophy. Across the pub, Old Reg sets his empty glass down with a quiet click, leaves exact change on the bar, and walks out without my noticing.
The world is continuing around me and I've dropped clean out of it, standing in this empty room with my mother's breathing in my ear and the afternoon light moving across the floor.
"Okay," I say. The word comes out smaller than I expected, a pebble dropped into a well that has no bottom.
"Okay?" She repeats it carefully, testing it for cracks, turning it over the way you'd examine something fragile.
"I'll drive down the day before." My fingers have gone white around the phone. "I'll come home."
The sound she makes isn't a word. It's an exhale that has been trapped inside her chest for months—I can hear its shape, all the calls where she bit her tongue, all the careful questions she swallowed, all the nights she probably sat at that yellow table wondering what had gone wrong this time.
"I'll make the bed up," she says, voice nearly steady. "The blue sheets—the ones you like."
"The ones I liked when I was seventeen," I say, and my voice is doing something inconvenient that we both ignore.
"You still like them. A mother knows." And there it is—the gentleness that has no defence, the kind you can't argue with because it isn't asking for anything.
My sternum aches, something tugging behind it, a hook I didn't know was embedded there. After we hang up, I stand behind the bar for a while, the phone still warm in my hand and the pub so quiet I can hear the cooler cycling.
Bev reappears with a clipboard and a streak of dust across her forehead. "Are you planning to serve actual customers today, or are you cosplaying a ghost? In which case, it's not Halloween yet."
She tries to joke, but it doesn't land quite like Callum's jokes did. I smile nevertheless. "I'm taking a few days off next week."
She raises both eyebrows—which for Bev is the equivalent of a standing ovation. "It's bloody time," she hums. I nod, and get to serving the actual clients.
Upstairs, the flat is quiet. Late sun pools across the desk where my notebook sits—the battered one with the coffee ring on the cover that I've carried since I arrived in this village.
I open it to a fresh page, uncap the pen, and write five words at the top: Things I Need to Tell Her. I stare at the blank lines beneath the heading, and then I start writing—and by the time the light has left the window, it's the longest list I've ever made.