The first message

You open the app on the bus, thumb already hovering over the delete button, because that is what the last three apps taught you to do. A new message. You read the preview with the particular tiredness of someone who already knows how the sentence ends.

It does not end that way.

'Is that the bookshop on the corner of Mill Street in your third photo? I have been trying to find out if it is still open.'

You look at your own photo as if someone else took it. You had forgotten the bookshop was even in the frame. You had chosen that photo because your hair was doing something right that day, and because the light made you look like a person on their way somewhere.

You type 'yes' and then delete it, because yes is a door you are not sure you want to open. Then you type it again, and add that it closes at six on weekdays, and that the owner's cat sleeps on the poetry shelf and will not be moved.

The answer comes before your stop. They laugh at the cat. They say they are looking for a book their sister read to them years ago, and they cannot remember the title, only that it had a lighthouse on the cover and made them cry on a train.

You realise, somewhere around the second bridge, that you have not once rehearsed an answer. Nobody has asked what your name used to be. Nobody has told you that you are brave, or asked whether you are 'real'. The conversation is about a lighthouse, a cat and a closing time.

It is such a small thing that you almost do not notice it. That is the point. You get off the bus and walk the long way home, past the bookshop, which is still open.