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CHAPTER 118- The Scan
publish date:
2026-07-22 16:42:50
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Staying with him CHAPTER 120- His Coaching, Her Practice
On a Thursday in September she had four sessionsand he had two groups with the under-sixteens andone individual conversation with Leon that ran twentyminutes past when it was supposed to end.She knew about the Leon conversation because hetold her when he got home, which was what they did,the exchange of the day's things over dinner, and sheknew about the content of the conversation in the wayshe knew about the academy things, which was in thetexture of it rather than the specifics, the quality ofwhat he said about Leon telling her everything sheneeded to know about the conversation's significancewithout requiring her to know the details.They had found the rhythm of this over the course ofthe pregnancy, which had extended over months andhad changed the quality of the evenings. The eveningsof the pregnancy were different from the eveningsbefore the pregnancy. She had noticed this and filed itwithout examining it for a while and then in August,lying on the sofa on a Tu
Staying with him CHAPTER 119- What She Tells Her Clients
The last client she told was the Thursday client, inJuly, and she told that one last for reasons she hadthought about carefully and arrived at over severalweeks of thinking about the specific person and whatthe specific information would do in the specificroom.She had told the others over the spring and into thesummer, one by one, in the ways that were right foreach person, and each telling had been its own smallevent with its own particular arc, the way everysignificant thing in the consulting room had its ownarc, the conversation about a thing becoming its ownkind of work. She had not expected this. She hadexpected the telling to be a disclosure and atransition, the practical management of the fact, thematter-of-fact informing of people who needed toknow. She had not expected the telling to be useful inthe ways that it turned out to be useful.The first client she told, in May, was the one who hadlost a pregnancy. She had been thinking about thistelling for months
Staying with him CHAPTER 118- The Scan
held his hand in the waiting room.This was not usual for her, the waiting room of amedical building. She was a person who waited inwaiting rooms with her phone or with nothing,contained, self-sufficient in the specific way she hadbeen self-sufficient in most rooms for most of heradult life. She was not usually a person who neededto hold someone's hand in a waiting room.She held his hand.He held hers back in the way he held things thatmattered, with the full settled weight of him, notperforming the holding, just holding.The waiting room had four other people in it and atelevision mounted in the corner playing somethingwith the sound off. The chairs were the standardchairs, plastic and institutional, the same chairs thatappeared in waiting rooms all over the country asthough there had been a single procurement decisionmade about waiting rooms somewhere in the 1980sand no one had revisited it since. She had a specificrelationship with institutional chairs. She sat in one
Staying with him CHAPTER 117- Maya's Expertise
Maya arrived on a Saturday in April with a large bagand a list and the expression of a woman who hadbeen waiting for exactly this occasion and was notgoing to let it pass without making the most of it.The bag contained: a specific brand of ginger biscuitsthat Maya had determined were superior to all otherbrands on the basis of extensive trial in the firsttrimester of her own pregnancy, a hot water bottlethat Maya had decided was essential and which Oliviahad told her she already owned and which Maya hadbrought anyway on the grounds that owning one andhaving the right one were different things, a bookabout birth that Maya had highlighted so extensively itwas essentially a different book, a small lavenderthing whose purpose Olivia could not immediatelyidentify but which Maya explained at length, and acontainer of something she had made at home andwhich she said Olivia must eat even if she did notwant to because the specific combination ofingredients was necessary for
Staying with him CHAPTER 116- The Body
body did not ask for her permission.That was the first thing she understood aboutpregnancy, and she understood it early, around weekseven, when the nausea arrived at four in the morningwithout warning or introduction and she lay in thedark feeling it and thought: I have been in this body forthirty-one years and I have never had the experienceof it doing something I had no decision about.She had managed her body, across thirty-one years,with the same deliberate attention she had managedeverything else. She exercised with intention. She atewith attention. She slept at regular times when shecould and she managed the disruption when shecould not. Her body had been, for thirty-one years, abody she had a relationship with, which was to say abody she had made arrangements with, whosepreferences she had learned and accommodated andoccasionally overridden.The nausea did not respect the arrangements.It arrived when it arrived and left when it left and shelay in the dark in
Staying with him Chapter 115-The New Year
January arrived in the flat with the quality of a thingthat was almost something else.Not almost spring. Too cold for that, the January thatfollowed the autumn of the pregnancy, the Januarythat arrived when she was thirty-five weeks along andthe birth was somewhere in the next five weeks andthe flat had already been reorganised twice and thearmchair from Damien's old flat had found its finalposition, against the wall of the second bedroom,which was no longer the room for things withoutbetter places but was the room that was about tobecome the thing it was always supposed to be.She sat at the kitchen table on the morning of the firstof January with her hands around a cup of tea and theflat around her in its specific January quiet.He was doing the stretch at the counter. The dailymaintenance of the body, the hands flat on theworktop and the breath going out slow, the hiprequiring its morning attention the way it had for yearsnow. She had watched him do this across so
Staying with him CHAPTER 7: The Morning After
She woke up and knew exactly where she was. No foggy confusion, no blinking at strange walls. Just the solid weight of Damien’s arm across her waist, the unfamiliar slant of light through his curtains, and that smell—his smell—that she’d stopped pretending she didn’t like days ago.She stayed still
Staying with him Chapter 6: The First Night
She lasted until midnight.That was the honest truth of it. She lay on his sofa with his blanket pulled up to her chin and stared at the ceiling and listened to the rain and told herself she was fine, she was comfortable, she was absolutely not thinking about the man sleeping fifteen feet away from
Staying with him Chapter 5: Staying
Maintenance said three days.Three days to fix the pipe, treat the damp, assess the flooring, do whatever it was they needed to do before the apartment was liveable again. Olivia stood in her doorway on Monday morning and looked at the state of it — the warped floorboards, the smell of wet plaster,
Staying with him Chapter 4: Caught
She woke up before him.6am, grey light coming through the gaps in his curtains, the television having switched itself off sometime in the night. For a moment — just a brief, disoriented moment — she forgot where she was. Then it came back. The flood. The knock. The blanket that smelled faintly of
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