Three days in Manchester and Ewan Carrick has already decided he's leaving.

The economics degree was his mother's idea. The damp halls, the grey skies, the moquette the colour of a confession nobody wanted to make: all confirmation that Lewisham was better. He'll finish the term. He'll go home.

Then Dr Laurence Haldrey walks into a lecture theatre, uncaps a marker, and Ewan's exit strategy falls apart. A proof that holds if — and only if — you're willing to stay inside the contradiction.

Ronan Carrick runs a site in south London and a family in Croydon, and the closest he's come to wanting something for himself in years is the way he can't stop watching the quantity surveyor who turns up on Tuesdays.

Celyn is twenty-five, Welsh, non-binary, and doesn't ask Ronan to keep up — but waits, the way someone waits for a kettle they know will boil.

The brother everyone depends on finally finds a word for what he is. It isn't the one his mother wants to hear. A quiet, unhurried romance about being late to yourself.