Jessica had texted me the address that morning and nothing else, which is how she sends an address. I knew the street.
Everyone who grew up round here knows the Northern Quarter the way you know a place that was rough when you were a kid and then got coffee shops, the bones still there under the new paint, the old rag-trade signs ghosting through above the doors.
I left the car in a multi-storey that used to be a market and walked the last bit, down off the main drag where the foot traffic thins out and the brick goes darker, past a record shop and a tattoo place and a barber with a queue out the door, looking for a frontage small enough to be the one Jessica would choose.
She had picked a small place in the Northern Quarter, the kind with four tables and a bloke doing something serious to coffee with a set of scales, the kind nobody who would recognise me would ever be caught in, tucked down a side street off the main drag where the brick still has the old mill soot in it.
