I nearly stayed home. The rain was loud enough to hear through the duvet, and the duvet had a much stronger case. It was warm, it asked nothing of me, and it had never made me walk fifteen minutes anywhere.
Get up, Emily. People have crossed the Alps for less than a croissant. Probably. Someone must have.
I put on the green coat with the broken zip and went, because I had gone every morning since the Tuesday in June, and I refused to be a person who quit over weather. I would quit over plenty of other things. Just not weather.
I spend my days at Aldridge Mutual working out how long strangers will live and what that will cost. I'm good at it. Nobody has ever asked me to model myself, which is lucky, because the model would flag me as a risk.
Halfway along the embankment I caught myself walking faster, so I slowed down. I wasn't rushing. I was walking. There was a difference. I have a face for this, calm and unbothered, and I put it on at the bins, because the bins are where the bridge first comes into view.
Daniel was already under the railway bridge, eating a sausage roll out of foil. He took up an unreasonable percentage of the dry ground and had to tilt his head to keep it off the brickwork. He looked like he'd just come off a twelve hour shift: stubble coming in patchy, dark crescents under his eyes, hair flat on one side where he'd leaned on something. Hospital lanyard. Blue scrub trousers under a jacket he had obviously slept in. My stomach dropped like I'd missed a stair, and I had to concentrate on holding the paper bag correctly. He looked up, and his tired face did something I can only call unfair.
"Morning," I said, in a voice I had never used before and do not plan to use again.
He blocked the wind off the river like a parked van. I stood against his sleeve because it was the only spot the rain didn't reach. That was the only reason. I had checked.
He had been there first. I'd worked that out in July, when the woman at the bakery counter said, "The lanyard one? Since spring. Never buys anything." I had arrived in June. I'd called him a coincidence for three weeks and a habit after that, and a habit is just a coincidence with a loyalty card.
"You're soaked," he said.
"It's raining."
"It was raining when you left."
"I noticed."
Noticed. Brilliant. Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, everyone.
"Rain's lazy here," Daniel said. "Up north it commits."
"Up where?"
"Anywhere." He folded the foil in half. "Nowhere. Eat your croissant."
I ate my croissant. I filed the remark under Later, which is a very large folder, and I have never opened it.
Water dripped off the arch onto my boot. On the foreshore a man in waders was poking the mud with a stick. I envied him. He had a task and a stick.
He looked at my coat. "Your zip's gone at the slider. The teeth are fine."
"It's been like that since March."
"It's a two minute job."
"I like it like this."
He nodded as if I'd said something sensible, and went back to his sausage roll. His eyes went to the zip twice more before he finished it.
Daniel was Maya's older brother. At Maya's thirtieth he had spent forty minutes fixing my mum's printer, and I had stood in the kitchen doorway holding a plate of olives, watching his hands. Maya caught me. "No," she said. "He's a disaster. Four flats in five years." I agreed out loud and thought about it for months. Mostly the hands. Also the printer, which has worked perfectly ever since and which I now resent.
"How was the date last night?" he said.
I looked at him. "Maya told you?"
"She told me."
"He explained index funds to me for an hour. I do this for a living." I took a bite of croissant. "I've looked at my own data and I'm bad at love. Small sample, consistent results. I keep waiting for something enormous and what I get is a nice morning. Today's is this croissant."
"What's wrong with a nice morning?"
"Nothing. Nobody writes songs about it."
"'Sunday Morning.' Maroon 5."
"Well..."
"'Better Together.' Jack Johnson. 'Put Your Records On.'"
"You made your point."
"Corinne Bailey Rae," he said, to the sausage roll. "You've told me about that croissant seventeen times."
I turned. "You counted?"
"I keep a tally on my phone. It's filed under Shopping." His ears had gone red. "I'm not proud of it."
I laughed so loudly that a pigeon left the ledge. Lovely. You sound like a goose being told a secret.
"Why are you here? You bring your own breakfast."
"Night shift ends at seven. My bus is at ten past eight. This is the one stretch between the ward and the bus stop where nobody wants anything from me." He folded the foil into a square, then a smaller one. "Then you started turning up to complain about your manager, and I started looking forward to it. I'm moving to Glasgow on the twenty-eighth. I haven't told Maya. She'll say I'm doing it again."
Oh. That's what Up North was. You're an actuary. You should have spotted the pattern.
"Are you?" I said.
"Probably. Nobody's ever asked me to stay."
Say it. It's one word. Dogs manage it.
"I'm not asking you to stay," I said.
"I know."
"I'm asking whether Glasgow has trains."
"You could look that up."
"I like to verify important information."
He breathed out through his nose, almost a laugh. His hand lay flat on the wet stone, wide enough that mine would cover only the back of it. The knuckles were cracked from hospital soap. I put my hand on top. His skin was freezing and the lanyard clip dug into my wrist. After a few seconds his thumb slid over and settled on my pulse.
He's timing you. He is actually timing you.
Normal resting range is sixty to a hundred. I was not resting.
I tried to calm down, which is the most reliable way to make a pulse go up.
He turned his head. I did not remember the decision to turn mine. Up close he had a small scar through his left eyebrow and a smudge of blue biro along his jaw, and I thought about that smudge with a seriousness I normally reserve for mortality tables. The rain had gone very loud and very far away. His thumb stayed exactly where it was, and he must have felt what it was doing, and he did not move it.
"Emily," he said, low, like he'd been saving it.
I looked at his mouth. I made no attempt to hide that I was doing it. Somewhere inside me a small, sensible clerk stood up and said this is not in the model, and I ignored her.
He leaned in about an inch. I leaned in about two, to be safe.
A bus crossed the bridge overhead, and the whole arch shook, and a pinch of grit landed on my croissant.
We both flinched. He straightened up. I stared at the croissant with great interest. It was a very good croissant.
"Come back tomorrow," he said, not quite steady.
"You'll be there."
"I was there first."
His thumb was still on my pulse. Neither of us mentioned it.
On the twenty-eighth I woke at 7:41 to an alarm I'd set for 6:30 and apparently slept through out of spite.
I dressed in the dark and ran for the bakery anyway, because I am a creature of habit and a coward, and bought two croissants, because I am a creature of habit and an optimist. The bridge was empty. The foreshore was empty. Even the man with the stick had given up, and he'd had a stick.
Fine. Good. Very mature. He's gone, you've got two croissants, go home and eat both and think about what you've done.
It was 8:02. His bus was at ten past. The stop on Harcourt Road was fifteen minutes from the bridge, in the opposite direction from my flat, my work, and every sensible choice I have ever made.
I ran.
I ran in the green coat with the zip hanging open and the paper bag held out in front of me like a bomb I'd been asked to defuse. A cyclist shouted something. I apologised to a lamp post. You haven't run since sports day, when you were sick on Mr Pell's shoes.
1.2 kilometres, seven minutes. I did the arithmetic twice in case it improved.
Somewhere around the second set of traffic lights, with a stitch coming on, I stopped hearing my feet and started hearing Gillian. On the Tuesday in June she had read my review aloud to the open-plan floor, line by line, and what I remembered now was not the words but the keyboards. Eleven people had found their keyboards fascinating. Needs to be more visible. Three weeks earlier I had asked for a small raise, one thing, said out loud, and that was the answer. At lunch I had walked to the river and bought a croissant and eaten it on a wall. It was the first thing all day that did what it promised, and somewhere around the last flaky corner I had decided that wanting things in public was a tax I was done paying.
Probability he says no: sixty percent. Seventy, given the suitcase. Your own models would reject this.
At 8:09 I turned onto Harcourt Road with my lungs on fire. Seven people stood in the shelter. Daniel was third in the queue, with a rucksack and a suitcase and the lanyard finally off. The 8:10 was already pulling in.
"Daniel!"
Seven heads turned. Then eight, when the driver looked too.
Seven people. Fewer than eleven. Statistically, an improvement.
"It isn't raining," Daniel said. He looked at my coat, my hair, the bag. "You're sweating."
"I ran."
"Why?"
The doors hissed open. The queue shuffled forward. My whole body offered me several exits, including a flat, quick death.
"Stay," I said.
It came out as a croak. I tried again. "I'm asking you to stay. Not in a does-Glasgow-have-trains way. Here. With the mud and my terrible coat. I've told you about a croissant seventeen times and you counted, and if you get on that bus I'll walk past that bridge every morning by myself, and I'd rather not."
Nobody in the queue moved.
"Also, I can't feel my legs," I said.
Daniel looked at my wrist, which was nowhere near him, then at his watch, then seemed to realise he had done both.
"Hundred and forty," he said faintly.
His rucksack slid off his shoulder and hit the pavement. Nobody picked it up, least of all him. A woman with a pushchair had stopped pretending to look at her phone.
"You getting on, mate?" said the driver.
Daniel looked at me. He looked at the bus. He put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out the foil from the bridge, folded so many times it had become a hard little cube, and held it in his fist.
"No," he said. "Sorry. No."
The doors closed. The bus pulled out and took a patch of rain with it.
"That ticket was probably non-refundable," I said.
"It was."
"You're really giving up a band six?"
"Probably." He looked at the empty road where the bus had been. "I'll have to ring them. I'll have to ring them from here, in front of you, because if I do it later I'll talk myself out of it."
"Then ring them."
"Now?"
"I'll hold your suitcase."
He took out his phone with the hand that wasn't holding the foil and found the number. It went to voicemail. I watched him decide not to hang up.
"Hello, this is Daniel Cooper. I'm calling about the band six post, the one starting on the first." His voice went thin on the date. "I won't be taking it. I'm sorry. Thank you for the offer."
He lowered the phone and looked at it as if it had said something rude.
"I think I've just resigned from a job I haven't started," he said.
His ears were red again. He had not let go of the foil. "Maya's going to be unbearable."
"I'll deal with Maya."
"You hate dealing with Maya."
"I'll do it in public," I said, and was surprised to find I meant it.
I held out the bag. He opened it and took out a croissant that had been squashed flat against my ribs for fifteen minutes.
"It's flat," he said.
"Rain does that."
"It's not raining."
"Then I did that."
He ate it in three bites and got flakes down the front of his jacket. Then he took the zip in his free hand, worked the slider back onto the teeth with his thumb, and pulled it up to my chin. I hadn't known it could go that high. I ate mine standing in the bus shelter, with a stranger's pushchair against my leg and his suitcase handle in my other fist and my heart going like a washing machine. Daniel put the foil cube in my coat pocket, next to the receipt from the bakery, and didn't say anything about it.
It was the best croissant I'd ever had.
I didn't check.
So I decided to write one.
“Fifteen Minutes at a Time” is about the kind of love we overlook — the quiet, ordinary kind that asks nothing grand, only that we keep showing up. It’s a story about learning to see the extraordinary in the familiar.
You can read the full story now on my blog (just below) and on Wattpad (click here to read on app).
And yes, I’m still working on Parenting Unpacked. But every now and then, I like to take a little detour. This one felt worth sharing.
I’d love to know what you think.
🥐 Fifteen Minutes at a Time
She almost didn’t go.
The rain had started before she was fully awake, the kind that makes staying in feel not just reasonable but virtuous. But three months ago, on a Tuesday bad enough that she’d rather not revisit, Emily had walked fifteen minutes in the cold and bought herself a croissant from the place by the river. It had been, improbably, the thing that held the day together. Not fixed. Held. And she’d gone back every morning since, because some things you don’t question.
She questioned very little about the mornings.
Including him.
Daniel was already there when she arrived, which shouldn’t have been possible since she’d never told him she was coming, and yet somehow hadn’t surprised her in weeks.
He didn’t say anything when she stepped under the bridge. Just made room against the wall the way you make room for something you were already expecting.
She stood beside him. Opened the paper bag. The croissant was warm.
Below them the Thames moved the way it always had, indifferent and permanent, the way things are when they’ve been there long enough to stop needing to prove it.
“You’re soaked,” he said.
“It’s raining.”
“It was raining when you left too.”
“I know.”
He looked at her the way he sometimes did. Brief, sideways. Like a question he’d decided not to ask yet.
She ate her croissant and watched the river.
They’d known each other two years. He was her best friend’s older brother, which meant she’d spent considerable effort at family dinners pretending not to notice him, which meant she’d noticed everything. The way he listened without filling the silence. The way he remembered things she’d said weeks later as though he’d been carrying them around. She’d filed all of it carefully under irrelevant.
The filing system had been under some strain lately.
Four months ago he’d started showing up here. She’d never invited him. He’d never explained. And somewhere in the accumulation of mornings, the rain and the coffee and the fifteen minutes of nothing in particular, she’d stopped pretending she didn’t look for him on the walk over.
She didn’t examine that.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, mostly to the river.
“About?”
“Love.” She said it the way you say a word you’ve been keeping at a distance. “I don’t think it’s for me.”
He was quiet. That was the thing about Daniel. He never rushed a sentence that wasn’t ready. She’d met no one else who could do that.
“I keep waiting to feel something enormous,” she said. “And instead I just feel ordinary things. All the time.” She looked at the bag in her hand. “I walk fifteen minutes every day for a croissant and that’s the best part of most days. Which probably tells you everything.”
“It tells me you know what you like.”
“It tells you something’s wrong with me.”
“Emily.” He said her name like he’d been not saying it for a while. “When did you last let yourself want something without building a case against it?”
She didn’t answer.
“The croissant,” he said. “You don’t argue yourself out of the croissant.”
“The croissant has never let me down.”
“Fair,” he said. Quietly. “Fair.”
The rain shifted. Not stopping. Just reconsidering.
“The thing about fireworks,” Daniel said, after a while, “is that you spend the whole time waiting for them to be over so you can go home.”
She looked at him.
He was watching the river. “Whereas a really good croissant, you’re just there. You’re not waiting for anything.”
She said nothing.
“That probably wasn’t what I meant to say.”
“I think it was exactly what you meant to say.”
He turned then and looked at her the way he did when he thought she wasn’t paying attention. Fully. Like he’d been waiting for a moment that kept almost arriving.
She was always paying attention.
“You’ve told me about the croissant,” he said, “seventeen times.”
She stared at him. “You counted.”
He looked back at the river.
Her chest did something she had no name for.
The silence that followed had weight. The kind you feel from the inside.
She looked at his hand on the ledge. Two inches from hers. Maybe one.
“Daniel.”
“Mm.”
“Why do you come here?” She kept her eyes forward. “You don’t get anything. You just stand in the rain.”
A long pause.
“I get fifteen minutes,” he said.
She felt it move through her the way cold air moves through a room when someone finally opens a window. Not dramatic. Just a change in everything, all at once, that you couldn’t have explained a moment before it happened.
Her fingers moved across the ledge.
His hand turned over and found hers. Quietly. Like he’d been waiting for it the way you wait for something you were already certain of.
Neither of them spoke.
The river moved. The rain carried on. A bus crossed the bridge somewhere above them and shook the world slightly and then it was still.
She looked at what was left of the croissant.
“It’s soggy,” she said.
“Come back tomorrow.”
She looked at him. He was already looking at her.
“Okay,” she said.
No declaration. No lightning. Just his hand in hers and the river doing what it always did and somewhere in her chest, quiet and unhurried, something settling into place like it had always meant to be there.
She finished the croissant.
Still the best part of her day.
