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Jean McBrien crosses the street carefully, making sure to look each way.
There is no especial danger in the London traffic tonight, but she is careful anyway. She is always careful. She is careful to look out for cars before she steps off the curb; she is careful to make three random and unnecessary turns on her route home; she is careful to pause and rummage in her handbag several times, using the motion to camouflage a quick glance behind her to check if there are any figures who appear more than once.
Careful was once a matter of life and death. Now it is a way of life, as instinctive as her tendency to drab colours, dull fabrics, staid cuts that effectively render her if not invisible then at least effectively unseen: one more middle-aged spinster librarian with a severe hairstyle and nothing to fill her evenings but a cat and the crossword.
She has a cat. She does the crossword.
Unlike most middle-aged spinster librarians, though, Jean McBrien pauses several houses short of her home and scans the windows of her house. Curtains closed in the upstairs front window means she can go in; curtains open means she can go in, but carefully; one drawn, one open, means she will walk straight past and get on the number 37 bus at the end of the street.
The curtains are closed. She walks briskly up the path, fishes out her key, and opens the door.
An irritated meow greets her and a haughty grey tom cat stalks down the stairs.
"I know I'm late, dear," Jean tells him. "But you really cannae be all that starving."
He meows again and then decides flattery is the better strategy and tries to wind around her legs.
"Give off, Alan," Jean says, because Alan is the cat's name, in a private joke that stays within these walls. "You'll ladder my stockings."
She shoves him away with one foot, sets her bag down on the hall table, and opens the living room door.
The fire is already lit and crackling, despite the warmth of the spring day. Old injuries ache, even in the mildest evening damp.
Jean crosses to the sideboard and pours herself a scotch. "I'm sorry I'm late, dear," she says.
From the armchair where she is busily filling in as much of the day's crossword as she can before Jean can get to it, one foot propped on a footstool and cane leaning against the wall, her - well, there is no word that quite fits. Room-mate, friend, companion, lover … all inadequate, like a decryption with a missing rotor key.
From the armchair, where she is busily filling in as much of the day's crossword as she can before Jean can get to it, the other inhabitant of the house and Alan's part-owner looks up over the edge of her paper and raises an eyebrow. "Trouble?"
"Och, no," Jean reassures her. "I thought I saw a shadow but it was nothing in the end."
The eyebrow stays up. "You're sure?"
"I am, my dear. Quite sure."
She leans on the back of the chair and peers down at the crossword. "Have ye no heart, woman? Leave me something, at least!"
Hilda Pierce tilts her head back to look up. "I'd be very disappointed to learn you didn't solve the whole thing on the way to work this morning."
Jean smiles down. "Not at all," she says.
Hilda snorts. "I'm glad to hear you're mortal."
"Fourteen down took me until my tea-break," Jean says, and, dodging a swat from her … room-mate, friend, companion, lover … from her wife in all but name and law, she goes to the kitchen to feed the cat and do something about dinner.