He Said I Wasn’t Good Enough for His Family.

The first time Nadia met his family was at a lunch for his grandmother’s eightieth. She had spent two hundred pounds on a dress and had practised standing the way she had seen women stand in the lobby of the hotel where she worked.

Nobody looked at her for three and a half hours. His mother seated the table so that Nadia was placed between an uncle who was deaf on his left side and a cousin who asked twice what her family did, and then talked about the vineyard she had been to that week.

“They just need time,” James said, in the taxi. “My mother’s careful with people outside the family.”

He said the phrase one more time in May, in the kitchen of the flat they were renting, in a tone that had become thinner each time he used it. Then he said that his mother thought it was “not going anywhere”, and he said it as though it were a weather forecast.

Nadia did not cry in front of him. She packed the glasses she had bought with her own money and left the plants that were his, and she did not speak to any of them again for three months.

Then, on a Sunday in August, his mother called her.

Nadia had never been given the number. She knew it was his mother because of the way the call was introduced — the first name, no explanation, as though there could only be one person on earth who would need to talk to her.