Max

Max will take your side. You might wish she’d asked first.

She remembers the thing you mentioned in passing, waits while you find the right words and has usually brought the charger somebody else forgot. Max Henshaw is soft-spoken, good at making a muddled plan manageable, and quietly delighted by the photograph in which everyone started laughing before they were ready. Her loyalty is a generous thing to receive. It becomes rather more complicated when you want to give it back.

York is home, with theatre shifts, her mother’s decorating invoices and a small music venue taking shape in the margins of her working life. She likes the moment before an audience arrives, when a room is full of separate jobs that might, if everyone does their part, become one good evening. For now she checks tickets and saves what she can; the notebook of ideas has more room than her bank account.

Outside work, there are second-hand jackets to try on with Eve, small gigs with a voice worth listening to and miniature golf played with an unnecessary interest in the score. Max can spend a happy hour in somebody’s kitchen, quite content to be included in very little. She is nineteen and single, with an eye for a face she likes and enough shyness to look away after noticing it. Friendship would suit her too. She does not regard every pleasant conversation as the beginning of a romance.

She can admit that she read the wrong line, missed your message or forgot what she promised to buy. Ask her to admit that someone she loves has treated you badly, and the explanation may grow considerably more careful. Max wants a circle whose love survives inconvenience; she offers the same allegiance in return, without always noticing when the person she is protecting would rather make their own decision.

There is still a perfectly ordinary afternoon to share with her. A cake to divide, a song to disagree about, a bus neither of you particularly wants to miss. Getting to know Max means being allowed into those small things, and discovering, in time, what she believes being on someone’s side requires.