I should have been home by midnight. Instead, a delayed flight and a very final-looking departure board left me standing in the station at eleven with a suitcase and a growing sense of grievance. The man at the ticket desk, noticing my expression, mentioned that an old night bus still ran to the coast, "if you don't mind company". I did mind, a little, but I bought a ticket anyway.
The bus smelled of diesel and oranges. Across the aisle an elderly woman was peeling one with the unhurried precision of someone who had never missed a connection in her life, and without a word she handed me half. At the back two students were coaxing a battered guitar into something like a tune, while the driver, who appeared to know every song ever written, hummed along over the roar of the engine. Somewhere beyond the last suburb I noticed that my grievance had quietly got off.
At three in the morning we pulled into a roadside café lit by a single buzzing tube, where strangers passed round a pot of soup as if we had been neighbors for years. Then, just before dawn, the driver abandoned the main road. "Nobody misses this on my bus," he announced, and parked at the edge of a cliff. We climbed out into the cold and watched the sun lift itself out of the sea, and not one of us said a word. I reached the coast hours late and entirely unrepentant, carrying the best story I owned.