The kitchen was white, and so was the light, and so, as far as Imran could tell, were the people.

Two Spoons Living worked out of a converted chapel on the Meadow Road, where a marble island had been installed under a stained-glass window of a saint who appeared to be disapproving of sourdough. Three ring lights stood on tripods like patient herons. A young man in a beanie, introduced only as "Cass, our producer," crouched behind a laptop with the stillness of a sniper, and every surface, the whisk, the flour bin, the Dutch oven in the colour of old roses, had been chosen to photograph.

"You're here!" cried Tamar Whitlock-Adeyemi, arriving across the stone floor in a cloud of linen and good teeth. She was thirty-four, small and gleaming, with a halo of braids tied up in a silk scarf, and she hugged Odette, who endured it, and then Imran, who didn't know where to put his hands. "Oh my gosh, look at you two, you're even *cuter*. Dex! They're here!"

"Hey, hey!" Dex Whitlock-Adeyemi appeared at the pantry door, wiping his palms on a striped apron. He was six foot three and sandy, with a jaw that belonged on a cereal box, and his handshake was very firm and a little damp. "Honestly, man, legend. Huge fan of the video. The dance. My mum calls it 'the sergeant's tango'."

"Thank you."

"You've got to teach me. Seriously. I've got zero rhythm. Tam says it's why we get so many comments." He laughed too loudly at his own joke, glanced at his wife, and stopped.

"We go live in four minutes," said Cass, without raising his head. "Aprons."

They were given aprons. Imran's was striped, like everyone's, and too small; Odette's came to her knees and had a pocket with a spoon embroidered on it. She regarded the spoon as one regards a fish. "I have never in my life been this decorative," she murmured.

"You look good."

"I look like a waitress at a very sinister brunch."

"Thirty seconds!" Cass rose from his laptop, vanished into the shadow of a lighting rig, and held up his hand. His fingers folded, one by one. The red dot on the camera brightened.

Tamar's face rearranged itself in an instant. It was a feat of engineering. One moment she was a tired woman scratching her ear; the next she was a creature of pure delight, eyes brimming, hands pressed together. "Spoooonies!" she sang. "Welcome back to the chapel! I'm Tam."

"And I'm Dex."

"And we have *so* much love in the kitchen tonight, because we have guests! Two very special humans from our community, who are also, we love to say, in the Steadfast race. Say hi, guys!"

"Hi," said Imran.

"Good evening," said Odette.

The comments scrolled up the side of Cass's screen like rising water, a fast green river of hearts and faces. He could see numbers in the corner: 4,812 watching. 5,300. A thing called *Spoonies* appeared to be gathering around the fire.

What followed was eighty minutes of the strangest, most gruelling choreography Imran had ever endured, including a fortnight in a desert with a broken radio. They were to make focaccia, which meant, as far as he could tell, being gently drenched in other people's goodwill. Tamar narrated. Dex fed the camera with jokes. Every few minutes they paused, hands clasped, and one of them said something like, "Okay, Spoonies, quick love language check!" and the chat roared, and he and Odette were required to say, in unison, what the other did that annoyed them. ("She alphabetises the tins." "He says *roger* when I say anything is fine.") They got a lot of hearts. At some point Dex produced a quiz card and read from it with the lacquered cheer of a man steering a cruise ship.

"First question, rapid fire! Imran. What does Odette order at a restaurant when she's nervous?"

"Soup," said Imran, before he'd thought. "Anything with broth. She says it's because she's cold, but it's so she's got something to do with a spoon."

There was a pause. In the corner of the screen the chat went *oh*, in a long streaming sigh.

Odette had turned her head. Her face, in the full glare of the ring light, was the face of someone who has heard her own name spoken in a language she'd thought no one else knew. She blinked, once, hard. "That is," she said, "actually true."

"Obviously it's true," said Imran, flushing. "I've seen you."

"You've seen me twice."

"I pay attention."

"They're *so cute*," whispered Tamar, to the lens. "Oh my gosh, Spoonies. Do you see them? This is what we mean when we say, you can't fake it."

And Dex, who had been laughing, did not laugh.

It lasted a second, no more, a gap between breaths. Then it closed, like water over a stone, and he was reaching for the olive oil. Imran, who had spent a lifetime watching for the half-second when a man's face lets go of its orders, saw it perfectly. He looked at the stained-glass saint. He looked at his own hands, floured to the wrists. And he understood, with the cold clarity of a man who has heard a very small noise in an engine, that Tamar and Dex Whitlock-Adeyemi were not a couple who got on.

"Where's the ring?" cried a viewer called Spoonie_Margaret, in the chat, in capitals. Cass read it out. The rest of the chat took it up like a chant.

"The ring! Show the ring!"

Odette's hand, floured to the wrist, had gone still on the dough. Imran watched her debate it. Then she lifted her left hand into the light and turned it, slowly, so that the little garnet caught the ring lights and glowed the colour of strong tea. For the first time that evening the room was truly silent. The chat paused. Then it exploded with a tide of tiny red hearts, and one comment that said, simply, *it looks like it's been somewhere*, which Imran thought was the best thing anyone had said about it.

"Still here," murmured Odette, to no one, and then looked appalled that she had said it aloud.

At the break, Tamar swept Odette away to the pantry to "fix her scarf," and Dex ushered Imran toward the back door with a bottle of sparkling water and an expression of studied ease. The yard behind the chapel was damp and tiled, lined with herb pots. Dex leaned on the wall and took a long drink and said nothing for a while.

"Six years," he said. "Six years we've been doing this. I met Tam at a house party in a kitchen. She was holding a spoon and a bad opinion of a casserole. I thought, I'd like to be in a room with that for the rest of my life." He rolled the bottle between his palms. "And now we're in a room with it from nine to five and eight to ten, with a ring light. Sorry. You don't want this."

"It's fine."

"It's just..." Dex let out a breath. "You said soup. I couldn't have told you what Tam orders. We've got a content calendar. She orders whatever's on the calendar."

"You'll find a way back."

"Will we?" He laughed, a short ugly sound. "We've got to win the grant. We've got a loan on this chapel. It's our entire income. If we lose, it's the end of the Spoons, and if it's the end of the Spoons, what are we?" He looked at Imran with sudden dismaying earnestness. "Don't tell her I said that."

"I won't."

"Walter said it'd be fine. Said it was in the bag." The words came out on a rush of relief, as if the sparkling water had loosened something. "Said we were the obvious pick. Said the Board loves a good-looking couple. And between us, man, no hard feelings, he said your lease was already spoken for. Said you'd be gone before Christmas whatever you did. He said it was a kindness to tell us, so we wouldn't waste any energy being nervous about you."

The yard went very quiet. Somewhere a gutter ran. Imran set down the sparkling water on the nearest herb pot with great care, as though the pot might otherwise go off.

"Did he," he said.

"Oh no." Dex's eyes widened. He glanced at the back door. "Oh, mate. I'm a *terrible* person. I wasn't supposed to say. Forget I said it."

"I'll do my best."

They went back in. In the pantry, Odette was tying a scarf with the hard efficiency of a woman strangling a snake, and Tamar was talking at the pace of a river in flood. The light was on, and the red dot, and Cass held up three fingers, two, and there was no time for the quiet conversation Imran would have liked. He took his place at the island. Odette looked at him and asked, with the faintest narrowing of her eyes, *what?*, and he shook his head: *later*.

"And we're back!" sang Tamar. "Okay, Spoonies, I'm feeling the dough, I'm feeling the *energy*, let's check in on the chat!"

The comments rose up the screen. Hearts. Fire. A thousand tiny hands. And in the middle of the flood, climbing the pinned slot faster than any other, in capital letters, from an account with a bread emoji in the name:

ASK THEM ABOUT FINCH AND SON. ASK WHO BUILT THE ROOM THEY'RE STANDING IN. ASK THE SERGEANT WHY HIS FLOOR IS SO CLEAN.

Cass's hands had frozen above the keyboard.

"Aww, someone's *very* excited about bread," said Tamar, brightly, scanning the chat. "I love a baker. We're such bread people. Who's Finch?"

"I'd like to know that too," said Imran.

He had said it quietly. But a microphone was clipped to his apron, and it carried to every one of the eleven thousand people watching, and the chat, which had been a river, became a flood. Dex stared at his hands. Tamar's smile, for the first time that evening, did not move at all. And from the dark beside the lighting rig, Cass, who had not spoken in an hour, said in an odd, flat voice, "Guys. Walter Osei-Lindqvist's just joined the stream."