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A lot of what Nancy knew about love came from books, which in hindsight wasn't very helpful when most of the men in Small Heath couldn't possibly compare to that of Mr Darcy or Captain Wentworth. In all practicality, a good man can't be poetry or a strikingly sweet metaphor with a pair of legs attached, they often just look like men and you have a fifty-fifty guess of whether they're a drunk, a fool or both.
Anything else she knew of love came from her parents, who quite obviously loved each other very much. She knew that her father met her mother while falling flat on his face in front of her - much like she would on a normal Tuesday morning - and he brought her a bunch of flowers handpicked from the patch of land nearby the stables because she liked the colour. She knew they married under the tree that they lay under now, and that her wedding dress is still in the loft of their house.
All of the above reasons made Nancy Cochran a hopeless romantic; a daydreamer lost in one big fantasy. It kept her optimistic, though; it got her through her draining eight hour shifts, sometimes ten, and it saved her from drinking her troubles away like some people she knew.
On her Monday shifts, she situated herself round the back of The Garrison, in Tommy's new office that used to be some dim, old storage room before the bang. Running around sorting the business numbers - or, at least, running around as much as she could in the cramped space - amidst their new acquisitions in pubs, racehorses, the lot.
Nancy had only stopped wreaking havoc about the office to pour herself one cup of tea (As opposed to the whiskey Tom tried to offer her multiple times that morning), and somehow in the mere five seconds of silence she'd allowed herself, chaos had reigned upon the room once again.
"...Who are you calling?" Being hidden behind the wide-open door, still pouring her tea, she watched Tommy saunter into the room leading another man– no, no, a boy.
The boy.
Effectively, this boy caused Nancy Marie Cochran to stop caring about the tea, the telephone and the bloody numbers. He stood there, awkwardly pin-straight in front of Tommy, with a matching flat cap to his dappled tweed jacket and a frankly adorable bow tie settled under his chin.
Taking a shamelessly long look at his face, she thought that this boy looked like how she imagined Mister Bingley throughout her many re-reads of Pride and Prejudice. He had a warm, kindly look about him; his hair was slightly fluffy underneath his cap and his eyes were this coastal sort of blue-ish grey you couldn't even find if you waded through The Cut.
When Tommy eventually shut the door, the two had turned to find Nancy still stood by the sideboard, her eyes still unabashedly locked on every uncomputed detail of the boy's face, and maybe the cute incoordination of the patterns of his suit - she'd guessed they were all from different sets, maybe from a father's hand-me-downs like her own. Tommy looked, for some reason, exasperated when he laid his eyes on his bookkeeper, while the boy across from her looked somewhat amused, with a silent, soft smile on his face.
