Chapter 6: Before
Lew
After that, Lew went home. He was still ostensibly living at the small flat over the laundry. He needed his independence and somewhere to hide when the clanging dissonance of interacting with a time not his own got to be too much.
He locked the bike at the bottom of the steps and greeted Agnes, who was standing in the open doorway of her laundry with a cup of tea precariously balanced on a windowsill.
“Afternoon, Mr. Tyler,” she said. “Busy?”
“Afternoon, Mrs. Watts,” he replied. “So-so. Yourself?”
“Just the usual,” she said. “I’m having a break from sheets. The mangle is killing me, and Doris has had to go home early to see to her mother.”
He offered her a cigarette from his battered packet of Players and fumbled one out for himself. He still had a strange, inn
