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Sometime later in 1921.
In the year Nancy Cochran had been working in the Shelby family business, she'd learned three valuable truths about life and herself.
Number one: she really was better at maths than everyone else. And Ethel Taylor from school really was jealous of her. She didn't mean to sound so immodest but it was true. When Tommy gave her a job under him as his bookkeeper - with a desk outside his office and everything - she worried that she'd bring the business nothing but trouble. Maybe she'd get all the numbers wrong, or knock one of Tommy's gas-lamps off the table and set his office alight? But she'd thrived, every working day, books upon books of accounts filed and reorganised (even the ones Tommy didn't ask her to review, which pissed him off half the time, but who was he to complain if he didn't have to do it?)
Number two: her clumsiness might just be a chronic, genetic thing. It was never something she'd managed to grow out of as she'd stepped through the threshold of young-adulthood, if anything she tripped up on her way in. She still embroidered her father's safety rules on the inside of her new coats, albeit the stitching was off and the writing was barely readable. Nancy Cochran was still the unluckiest girl in Small Heath, and honestly? She wouldn't have it any other way: what kind of day would it be if she didn't trip on the cobblestones first thing in the morning?
Number three: the Shelby's themselves were a seething storm that she's found herself stuck in the eye of. On her first day in his office, Tommy told her of his endeavours to make Shelby Company Limited eighty percent legal in three years - something Nancy had mindlessly giggled at once he'd said it - and how he'd need her maths brain to help make it happen, combined with the Shelby's brains around horses and complete inability to abide by the law, especially if said law is overseen by a certain Irish bastard. Tommy had kept to his assurance that she wasn't to be involved in their illegal dealings, but that didn't mean she didn't see the men slumped in alleyways with cut smiles or the hushed meetings over fixed races. In all honesty, the fixed races made her job easier. Sometimes a little recklessness was fun, necessary.
But her 'oblivious' leisure behind her own desk kept her sane, sober and satisfied. In just a year, she'd barely changed from the clumsy girl wandering Watery Lane and ransacking her mother's sweet shop; she just grew a couple years older and a couple hundred richer. Her hair had grown out gracefully, her stocky fringe had wisped to one side of her face, finally making acquaintance with the ends of her hair sitting at her shoulders, now in grown-up curls that sit in bright white rollers every morning before work. But she still knocked into something every now and then (every day), she still smiled like she had nothing to be sad about, and she still excused herself for swearing like she'd committed a crime, now just in front of real criminals.
