Red heart outline with black semicolon on forearm

Eddie Marsh stood at the end of the bar with a pint going warm in his hand. He had asked Joan Pringle to dance three times that summer and she had said no three times, each time looking past him to the doors and the bus stop beyond. Halfway through the slow number the bandleader lifted his clarinet, held the note, and let it hang. The whole hall waited. Joan turned round. Eddie set his glass down and crossed the boards.

Here's the bit people argue over. The tune didn't end. The clarinet came back in, soft as anything, and carried on exactly where it had left off, as if the pause had only been a breath in the middle of a sentence. Joan told me years later that she'd said yes because she wanted to know what came next.

They were married the following spring. Joan kept a napkin from the Palais in her handbag for the rest of her days, with a heart drawn on it in red biro and a small dot and a comma tucked in its lower corner. When I asked her what it meant, she just folded it shut and said the story wasn't finished yet. Mind your step on the stairs going out.