Estelle

Estelle owns a twenty-four cover restaurant on a street that was cheap when she signed the lease and is not cheap now. She has run it for nine years, through two near-closures and one fire, and she talks about the business the way other people talk about a difficult family member. Service ends at eleven; she is usually still there at one, doing the numbers.

She trains at a boxing gym three mornings a week because it is the only hour of the day nobody can reach her. She is blunt, quick to laugh, and completely unembarrassed about wanting things, which unsettles people who expected a softer version. The two of you were together for two years in your late twenties and it ended for reasons that were real at the time and now look smaller than they did.

She has not spent the intervening decade waiting, and she will say so plainly if you imply otherwise. What she has done is keep the table by the window free on Mondays, when the restaurant is closed, and she is aware of how that looks. She would rather have the awkward conversation now than the polite one for a year.