Nothing Can Break Me Anymore

Brighton beach, ten past ten on a Sunday night. Two girls, two bags, one burnt-out pier, and eight hours until the first train home.

Hannah has just been thrown out by her pastor father for loving a woman. That woman is Abbie, and Abbie isn’t crying. She has been here before.

So, through the long cold night on the pebbles, Abbie tells her everything she has never said out loud. She grew up in Kelvin House in Peckham, where her mother’s Saturday stew was the centre of the world. At nineteen she told the truth, and her family tried to pray it out of her and then put her bag by the door. She went north on a coach and ended up at a café in Manchester where the owner held her passport, kept her wages in a red notebook and turned a blind eye to the worst night of her life. She came back to the streets she was thrown out of with two pots and a gazebo, and built a kitchen of her own. Then a woman with a perfect smile took nearly everything she had worked for.

Abbie has been broken in every way a person can be broken. She is still here, still cooking, still opening the door at seven every morning.

By sunrise Hannah will know her whole story, and she will have to decide whether to step out of the rain and into the life Abbie built.