Chapter 4: The Gap Between

I put the phone in my bedside drawer.

Not on the nightstand. Not in my bag. In the drawer, underneath the novel I was currently reading and the hand cream I kept meaning to use and an old cinema ticket stub I had never thrown away for reasons I had never examined too carefully.

Out of sight.

Not gone.

I stood up and smoothed the duvet with both hands. An unnecessary, slightly compulsive gesture. My body needing something to do while the rest of me caught up. Then I went to the bathroom, washed my face and looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment.

Composed. Clear-eyed. Diamond ring catching the bathroom light with quiet insistence.

"It was four sentences," I told my reflection. "He said congratulations and you put your phone in a drawer. That is not a situation. That is nothing."

My reflection looked unconvinced.

I went to make tea.

The day passed the way Sundays do when something unordinary is sitting underneath the surface of them. Each hour behaving exactly as it should while something underneath moved slowly, like water finding its level.

I cleaned the flat. Answered emails I had been putting off. Called my mother, a comfortable meandering conversation about nothing consequential that I needed more than I had realised. I ate leftover rice standing at the kitchen counter and watched a documentary I could not afterward summarise. Went for a walk along the canal in the late afternoon grey.

London was doing its Sunday thing. Cyclists. Dogs. Couples walking with the particular ease of people who had nowhere urgent to be. I walked with my hands in my coat pockets and my ring pressing against the lining and thought about nothing specific with the focused determination of someone thinking about something very specific.

I did not take my phone out.

I did not check the drawer when I got home.

I ran a bath instead. Lay in it until the water cooled. Got out. Put on comfortable clothes.

Tobi called at seven.

"Still at the studio," he said. Tired in the good way. The satisfied exhaustion of someone who had spent the day doing work they cared about. "The light calculations are finally behaving. I think."

"That's good."

"How was your day?"

"Quiet," I said. "Good quiet."

"Good." A warmth in his voice that I felt somewhere in my chest. "I'll call you before I sleep."

"Okay."

"Ada."

"Yeah?"

A brief pause. Not uncomfortable. Just the pause of someone choosing how to say something.

"I'm glad you said yes," he said.

I closed my eyes.

"Me too," I said.

After I hung up I sat on the sofa for a while in the quiet.

Both things were true. I was glad I had said yes. I was also sitting in a flat with a phone in a bedside drawer containing a message I had read three times and not deleted.

Both things were simultaneously, uncomplicatedly true.

That was the part nobody warned you about.

I did not sleep well.

At some point after midnight I got up, went to the kitchen, drank a glass of water and stood at the window looking at the street below. A fox moved across the road with the unhurried confidence of a creature that had decided the city belonged to it after dark. I watched it until it disappeared around the corner.

Went back to bed.

Lay in the dark.

Thought about the message.

Seeing you last night reminded me of something I've been trying to forget for eight months.

I knew what that something was. I knew it with the specific unwelcome clarity of a woman who had spent eighteen months learning every frequency of a person and eight months trying to unlearn them.

I also knew that knowing what it was and knowing what to do with it were entirely different problems.

I turned onto my side.

Closed my eyes.

Opened them again.

You are an engaged woman, I told myself. You have a ring and a good man and a life that makes sense. You received an unsolicited message from someone you used to know and you put it in a drawer. That is the correct response. That is the adult, proportionate, correct response.

My brain received this information.

Filed it.

Continued doing exactly what it had been doing.

Morning arrived with the grey unhurried certainty of a Monday that had been coming regardless.

My alarm went off at six-thirty.

I reached for my phone and stopped.

Looked at the bedside drawer.

Looked at my phone.

Got up without touching either.

Showered. Dressed. Made coffee. Stood at the kitchen window with my mug and watched the street assemble itself in the early dark. The first buses. A man walking a small dog with great seriousness. The gradual accumulation of a city returning to itself after the brief amnesty of the weekend.

I went back to the bedroom.

Picked up my phone.

Opened the drawer.

Read his message one more time.

Put it back.

Picked up my work phone.

Three new messages from clients. One from Kwame about a prospective brief. One from Priya that said only: wine this week? I have thoughts.

I smiled despite myself.

Typed back: Thursday. Broadway Market. Bring the thoughts.

Put my phone in my bag.

Picked up my coffee.

Walked to the door.

Stopped.

Went back to the bedroom.

Opened the drawer.

Picked up my personal phone.

Typed four words to Damien Adeyemi.

Thank you. Take care.

Pressed send before I could think about it.

Put the phone back in the drawer.

Walked out.

His reply arrived at 7:46am.

I was on the tube. Standing, one hand on the overhead rail, surrounded by the compressed morning silence of a carriage full of people performing the communal act of not looking at each other.

I felt the buzz in my bag.

Did not take the phone out.

Told myself I would check it at the office.

Checked it at Bank station when the carriage emptied and I had room to breathe.

That's not what you actually want to say.

But I'll take it.

I stared at the screen.

The tube doors opened. Closed. The carriage moved forward into the dark of the tunnel.

I put my phone away.

Stood in the moving dark with my hand on the overhead rail and my ring pressing against the metal and the specific unwelcome knowledge that he was right.

It was not what I actually wanted to say.

I had known that when I typed it.

I sent it anyway.

That was what stayed with me all the way to Canary Wharf. Not his reply. Not his accuracy.

Mine.

The gap between what I meant and what I said.

The in-between.

And it was only Monday morning.