They went up at four o'clock in the morning and neither of them has ever pretended it was a surprise.
That is the part she has never been embarrassed about, in two years or in six. There was no moment where anybody misread anything: they had been sitting eleven inches apart on two stools since midnight, and at about half past two she had stopped bothering to look away, and at four he stood up and said, "I'm on the ninth floor," and she said, "I know. You said it at one o'clock and I have thought about it four times since."
The lift took eleven seconds and neither of them said one word in it.
He had one hand flat on the small of her back. That was all — the whole way up, not moving, and Simone Adeyemi stood in a lift in a hotel on the Mainzer Landstrasse and understood that she was going to have to think about a hand on the small of her back for a very long time.
The door shut behind them and her coat was on the floor before the lights went on.
He was unhurried, which she had not expected from a man who had crossed a corridor at that speed.
That is the thing she went over for two years — not the room, which was extraordinary, but that a man who had been talking to her for four hours went on talking to her.
That somewhere past five, with her hands in his hair and the whole city going grey through a gap in the curtains, he stopped and put his forehead against her collarbone and said:
"Say the thing about your mother again."
"Now?"
"You said it at one o'clock and I have not been able to stop thinking about it," said the man from the bar. "You said you have been angry since you were eleven and that it is the only reason you have ever done anything.
"And I have been sitting in that bar for four hours thinking that I do not know one single person who wants anything like that."
She told him.
At half past five in the morning, in a hotel room in Frankfurt, in the dark, to a man whose surname she had specifically refused to learn, Simone Adeyemi told the whole of it for the first time in her life.
That Yinka Adeyemi came to England at nineteen and did agency shifts at three hospitals for nine years.
That agency work in that sector is paid three weeks in arrears, always, everywhere, and that this is not a scandal and nobody has ever hidden it, it is simply how the plumbing was built.
That in the February of 2011 her mother did not eat for two days at the end of a month, and that Simone found out about it when she was nineteen, by accident, from her aunt, in a kitchen.
"And I did not say anything to her about it," she said. "Not then, not since. I have never once said to my mother I know about the February. And I built a company."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Say her name," he said.
"What?"
"You have said my mother about eleven times tonight," said the man on the ninth floor. "Say her name once, out loud, to somebody who does not know anything about either of you and is never going to."
"Yinka," said Simone Adeyemi.
And then, unexpectedly, entirely without permission, she cried for about ninety seconds in a hotel room in Frankfurt at twenty to six in the morning, and a man she had known for six hours did not say one single word about it and did not let go.