LOGINShare
CHAPTER 150- The Flat
publish date:
2026-08-04 19:53:04
Latest chapter
Staying with him CHAPTER 150- The Flat
The conversation arrived on a Sunday morning in July, which was when the importantconversations arrived, which was when they had always arrived: Sunday mornings, overcoffee, the flat warm and the city outside doing its Sunday thing.They had been not-having the conversation for several months.She had known it needed to happen. He had known it needed to happen. They had bothbeen knowing it needed to happen since approximately February, since the baby hadbecome the size of a baby who would not indefinitely fit in the second bedroom with thearmchair and the cot, since the practical reality of the flat had begun to make itselfknown in the specific daily ways of a space that was the right size for two people andwas now the home of three people and a bowl and a shelf and a photograph and a blueblanket and a cot and an armchair and a rug and the accumulated permanent things offive years.They had been not-having the conversation in the specific way of two people who wereboth aware
Staying with him CHAPTER 149- Diana And Damien
Diana called on a Wednesday in June.She did not call often. She appeared, in the specific Diana way, at the occasions thatrequired appearing at and she called on Sunday mornings at the time that had beenestablished across thirty-three years of Sunday morning calls. The Wednesday call wasnot the Sunday call. It was the other kind.Damien answered.She heard his side of the call from the kitchen, the low Diana-call voice, but theconversation was shorter than the Sunday calls. He came in and he said, she is comingSaturday.Just her, Olivia said. Not an occasion.He looked at her.Just her, he said.Diana arrived on Saturday afternoon with a specific quality that Olivia associated withDiana on the occasions when she was going to say a thing she had been preparing for awhile. She had come to the flat before the baby and she had come after the baby andshe had come for the Christmases and she had sat at kitchen tables and said good in thetone and she had put her hands on Olivia’s s
Staying with him CHAPTER 148- The Baby At Six Months
Life continued.This was the thing she had not fully understood about grief, the specific quality of it thatwas different from how she had understood it professionally. She had understood griefprofessionally in the clinical sense, the stages and the timeline and the specific thingsthat helped and the things that did not. She had understood it from the outside of it fornine years of the consulting room.She had not understood how much life continued inside it.Life continued in all its specific and demanding particularity. The baby continued to existand to need things and to develop and to become more specifically herself with everypassing week. The academy continued to run and the sessions continued to happen andthe under-sixteens continued to need coaching. The practice continued, the Tuesdaythrough Thursday of it, the clients who came and the work that happened in the roomwith them.The baby turned six months old on a Thursday in May.She had been sitting up for three weeks
Staying with him CHAPTER 147- The Note
He read it to her in the dark.Not the night he found it. Months after the finding. She had not known when he wasgoing to read it to her and she had not asked, which was the right approach, which wasthe approach of a person who had learned when asking was the right thing and when thewaiting was. She had waited.She had been in bed, one evening in October, when he came in from the other roomwhere he had been after the baby was asleep, and he sat on the edge of the bed and hesaid: I want to read you something.She sat up.He had the note in his hand. The piece of paper from the filing cabinet that had been inhis jacket pocket and then somewhere she did not know and now in his hand.She did not turn on the lamp.The dark seemed right.He unfolded the paper.He read it.He read most of it quietly, not sharing the reading, and she sat in the dark and she lethim read it, let him have the whole of it for himself first, which was his by right.And then he found the line.She knew when
Staying with him CHAPTER 146-After Marcus
The academy without Marcus was a different quality.Not a lesser quality. Not the academy diminished. The same work, the same sessions,the same players at the same pitches at the same times. But the quality of the space hadchanged in the way that spaces changed when the person who had made them was nolonger in them, the specific ambient of a place shifting with the absence of the personwho had shaped its ambient.She noticed it the first Thursday.She had been in the office before and after the session and the office had the quality ofan office that was now fully his, not in the transitional sense of a space being handedover but in the complete sense of a space that was simply whose it was. Marcus’spapers were gone — his daughter had come and taken them, quietly, the week after, andDamien had helped her. What remained was what had always been there alongsideMarcus’s things: the filing cabinet that Jenny maintained, the whiteboard with thesession diagrams, the fixed blind, th
Staying with him CHAPTER 145- The Funeral
It was small.This was what Marcus had wanted, Damien knew, because Marcus had told him, once, inthe specific off-hand way Marcus said the things he had been thinking about for a longtime: if something happens, small. The players I made. Nobody else.Small was how it was.The chapel was not full. It was not supposed to be full. It was the people who needed tobe there and not the people who would have come because it was the occasion to cometo. The people who needed to be there were a specific and particular group, connectedto the man in the specific and particular way that forty years of the right work producedconnections.The players he made.They came from different decades.The ones from the nineties were forty now, some of them. She had seen a photograph ofone of them on the wall of Marcus’s office at the academy, a photograph she had lookedat many times without registering the age of the player in it, and the player was now inthe chapel at forty, the specific quality of
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
You may also like
Mommy, Where Is Daddy? The Forsaken Daughter's Return
LiLhyz3.4M viewsFlash Marriage: A Billionaire For A Rebound
LiLhyz734.4K viewsForbidden Love Stories
Avi22Nash1.2M viewsWarning: My Mommy is A Savage!
Seeking A Peaceful Life2.1M viewsTheir Slave
Mehaklovely192 viewsMY REVENGE HIS STEPBROTHER
Pabalelo Mabona137 viewsSubstitute Wife For The Cold-Hearted Prince
Mol Des67 viewsForbidden; Billionaire’s Secret Desire
Commy vic19.9K views
