It's chucking it down.

Not drizzle, not a Britishly apologetic spit of rain, but the full biblical event, the kind that makes the gutters on Clerkenwell Road gurgle like they're having a breakdown of their own. You've lost your umbrella to the wind gods (it died heroically on Tuesday, inside-out outside Pret, a £4 casualty) and now you're hovering under the awning of a shuttered dry cleaner's like a drowned cat on a doorstep, holding your tote over your head, which is working about as well as a doily.

It's 7:12. You have stayed late to finish the Pemberton line edits, because you are a woman of discipline and also because going home meant admitting there's nothing in the fridge but oat milk and regret.

Your hair has given up. Your ballet flats have given up. Your will to live is on a go-slow.

Then the rain stops.

Not stops. Stops on you. A black brolly has appeared over your head, enormous, structured, the umbrella equivalent of a good coat.

You know who it is before you look. You know from the vetiver. From the clean linen. From the faint note of bad decisions drifting down through the damp like a cologne ad directed by Satan.

"Don't say anything," says Rory.

"I wasn't."

"You were composing something. I could hear it."

You were composing something. It had a semicolon in it. It was devastating.

You shut your mouth and glare at the road instead, and he glares at it too, and for a moment you're just two people looking furiously at a bus that's not coming.

"Farringdon?" he says eventually, like it's a question and not a hostage negotiation.

"Obviously."

"Right."

And you walk.

It is, hands down, the longest eleven minutes of your life. The rain drums on the canopy like it's trying to fill the silence for you. Neither of you speaks. Your shoulder is six inches from his arm and you can feel those six inches, the way you can feel a hob you've just turned off. A black cab sloshes past and sprays the kerb, and he moves, smoothly, without comment, to the outside of the pavement.

Don't. Don't read into it. That's just manners. That's just a guy raised by an academic who made him learn to walk on the road side.

He texted u up? on Friday. At 11:47. You're not doing this.

And then, at the lights on Farringdon Road, you glance up at the umbrella. And then, sideways, at him.

The brolly is not over him.

It is, in fact, so far over your side that you're practically in a tent, a dry little pocket of the world, while his left shoulder takes the full force of the storm. The expensive wool of his coat (the good one, the charcoal, the mood one) has gone dark and heavy and sodden. Rain is running off his jaw. It's dripping off the ends of his hair onto his collar. He's staring straight ahead, expression completely neutral, like a man who is absolutely not getting rained on in the name of anything.

Your stomach does something indecent.

Say something.

Say, "you're soaked."

Say, "you absolute idiot, move the umbrella."

You open your mouth.

The light turns green, and he starts walking, and the moment slips off the kerb and into the gutter with the crisp packets.

You don't mention it.

You spend the rest of the walk very carefully not mentioning it, with the heat of the not-mentioning sitting between your ribs like a swallowed coal.

At the station entrance, under the bright, harsh strip-lighting, the crowd steaming in a fug of wet wool and Lynx, he stops. Folds the umbrella down with a snap. Shakes it once. And holds it out to you, handle first, like it's a manuscript he's not nervous about.

"Keep it."

"I can't take this." You turn it over. There, stitched small and smug along the edge of the canopy, is a tiny tan check pattern. "It's Burberry."

"Is it?" says Rory, innocent as a vicar at a christening. Water drips off the end of his nose. "Hadn't noticed."

You stare at him.

He stares back. Perfectly blank. Perfectly sodden. His ears, you notice, are going slowly, treacherously pink.

Oh, you absolute bastard.