The rule was made at about half past eleven at night and it was hers.
She had been at that conference for three days. She had said the same four sentences approximately ninety times — Anansi, same-day settlement, four hundred thousand shift workers, no we are not a lender — and she had done it in a room where every single person had a lanyard on and had looked at hers before they looked at her face.
She had come down to the bar at eleven to be on her own for an hour.
He sat down two stools along at about twenty past.
He did not say anything for four minutes, which she noticed. He ordered a beer and looked at nothing and had the particular stillness of a man who has been in rooms since seven in the morning, and she watched him in the mirror behind the bottles and thought, entirely idly: that one has had a worse day than me.
At about twenty-five past he turned his head and said, "Sorry — are you here for the — "
"No surnames," said Simone Adeyemi.
"Sorry?"
"You're about to ask me what I do." She turned round on the stool. "Everybody in this hotel has asked everybody else in this hotel what they do since Tuesday morning, and I have said the same four sentences about ninety times, and if you ask me I will say them again and then I will have to go to bed."
The man on the next stool put his beer down.
"All right," he said. "No surnames. No jobs."
"No jobs."
"What's left?"
"Everything," said Simone. "Which is the point. Go on, then. Something true, and it cannot be about work."
He thought about it for four seconds, which she also noticed.
"I have not read a book since 2019," he said.
"That's not — "
"That is entirely true and it is the worst thing about me. I buy them. I have got about forty. I put them by the bed and then I read forty minutes of a document about margins instead, and I have started to find it genuinely frightening."
Simone Adeyemi looked at him properly for the first time.
"All right," she said. "That's a good one."
"Your turn."
"My mother did agency shifts for nine years," she said, "and I have been angry about it since I was eleven, and it is the only reason I have ever done anything."
That is how it started, and it went on for four and a half hours, and both of them have said since — separately, in different years, to different people — that the bar is the part that mattered and not the room.
At about one he said: "I don't know if I'm any good."
"At what?"
"Any of it. I have got a job that four hundred people wanted and I have had it for four years, and everybody thinks I am extremely good at it, and I cannot tell whether that is me or whether it is that the man before me was so catastrophically bad."
"That's not a something-true, that's a confession."
"You said no jobs, you did not say no confessions," said the man on the next stool, and Simone Adeyemi laughed out loud in a hotel bar in Frankfurt at ten past one in the morning for the first time in about eight months.
At two she said the thing she has thought about most.
"Nobody has asked me a question I wanted to answer in about eight months."
He did not say anything clever about that.
He said: "Ask me one, then," and she did, and they were still going at four.