Then he nods once, small and approving beneath everything else.
Chris lifts his glass slightly in my direction.
Tommy does the same.
Even Rob, after a second.
Emma watches me quietly.
Then she smiles.
I glance toward the stairs again without meaning to.
Nick follows my gaze.
“She’ll smash it,” he says.
I nod.
I already know that.
The first chord carries further than it has any right to in a room like this.
The Devil’s Barrel was never designed for clarity. It was built for noise and spilt pints and conversations that overlap until nothing can be separated from anything else. But somehow her voice cuts through it anyway, not by force, but by existing with a kind of quiet confidence that makes everything else step back.
Christina stands at the microphone with one hand resting lightly on the stand, her shoulders relaxed in a way that feels both familiar and entirely new. I’ve seen her behind the counter at the shop, sitting at my kitchen table, lying beside me in the early hours of the morning when the world feels smaller and more honest. But this version of her belongs to something wider.
She glances across the room, and when her eyes find me, she smiles.
It isn’t the smile she gives customers, or Emma, or anyone else. It’s smaller than that. Personal.
Then she starts to sing.
Her voice settles into the space like it has always belonged there. There’s no strain in it, no performance in the way I expected there might be. She isn’t trying to impress anyone. She’s simply allowing herself to be heard.
Around me, conversations fade without anyone announcing it. Chairs shift. Glasses pause halfway to mouths. Even Nick, who rarely stops talking for longer than thirty seconds, goes quiet.
I feel it in my chest before I fully understand why.
Then the band moves into the next song.
I recognise it immediately.
Not from the opening chord, but from the shape of it. From the way it settles into something familiar before it fully reveals itself.
Next to Me.
The memory arrives without warning.
My cottage. Christina beside me, half-awake, her hair a mess across the pillow. The quiet that comes after something irreversible has already happened.
I hadn’t planned it.
The words had just been there, sitting somewhere behind my ribs without purpose, until suddenly they had one.
I remember the way she’d looked at me when she realised what I was doing. Not laughing. Not embarrassed. Just still, like she understood that this wasn’t performance. That it wasn’t something I did.
It was something I gave.