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CHAPTER 18:December
publish date:
2026-06-11 16:32:47
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Staying with him CHAPTER 38-Sunday
There was nothing to do and nowhere to be, and the whole of one grey wet Sunday in February simply stopped and let them off the hook.She woke late, which she never did. He was already awake but had not got up, which he never did. And so they lay there in the unhurried half-dark with the rain working steadily at the window and no reason on earth to move and, crucially, no spoken agreement to stay, which was the better thing, the staying that came from neither of them suggesting they get up.Eventually he went and made eggs, and she sat on the kitchen counter while he did it, wearing one of his shirts and nothing useful, holding her coffee, her bare feet hooked over the edge of a drawer, and they talked about nothing. They argued amiably about a documentary they had each fallen asleep during at different points. They debated whether the plant in the bathroom was genuinely dying or merely, as she maintained, dramatic. He burned the first egg badly and swore at the pan with real feeling
Staying with him CHAPTER 37- Marcus
She came home on a Thursday evening to find astranger sitting at her kitchen table, except that hewas not a stranger, she understood inside a second,because Damien was talking to him in a voice she hadheard exactly twice before in her life and only everleaking out of a phone held to his ear.The sharp voice. The deliberate one. The version ofhim that surfaced for precisely one person on earth.This is Marcus, Damien said.Coach Marcus was older than she had built him in herhead, well into his sixties, with the frame of a manwho had been a serious athlete a very long time agoand had held on to just enough of it to make a kitchenfeel small. He stood up to shake her hand, which shehad not expected, and he kept hold of her eye while hedid it, which she had expected even less, and he said,so you are Olivia, in a tone that told her plainly she hadbeen a subject of discussion.I am, she said.Heard a lot about you, Marcus said. None of it out ofhim, you understand. He does not
Staying with him CHAPTER 36-The Quiet Letter
They drove back south on the twenty-eighth into aLondon that had emptied itself out for the strangedead week between Christmas and the new year, thestreets soft and underpopulated, half the shops dark,the whole city holding its breath in the way it only didfor those few grey days a year. The flat when they letthemselves into it was cold and unlit and entirely,perfectly theirs, and Olivia stood in the middle of itwith her coat still on and felt the specific deep relief ofcoming home from somewhere that had gone well.The post was on the mat. He scooped it up with thekeys still in his hand, the usual fan of envelopes, andshe watched him, without meaning to watch him, gothrough them standing up, and she saw him stop onone.Thick paper. Cream, not white. A small printed crest inthe corner that she half knew and could not place.Addressed to him, his full name, the formal versionnobody used. He looked at it a half-second longerthan a person looks at a circular or a bank sta
Staying with him CHAPTER 35-Maya
Maya arrived on Boxing Day at eleven in the morningwith the baby, a bag the approximate size of a smallfridge, and the wild, hollow-eyed energy of a womanwho had not slept a full night in four months and haddriven forty minutes on fumes and spite.Take her, Maya said, by way of hello, and put the babyinto Olivia's arms before Olivia had finished standingup, and walked straight past her toward the kitchenand the kettle and ten unbroken minutes of being aperson who was not currently holding another person.The baby was called Esme. She was three and a halfmonths old and she looked up at Olivia with thedeeply unimpressed expression of a small magistratereserving judgement. Olivia stood in her parents'hallway holding her niece and felt the real and slightlyalarming weight of her, the warmth coming off her, thefact of a whole entire person who had not existed atall the last Christmas she stood in this hallway.She is heavier than she looks, Damien said, appearingat Olivia's
Staying with him CHAPTER 34-Her Father
The house smelled the way it had smelled her entirechildhood, a smell she could not have described to astranger but knew in her body the instant the dooropened, gravy and radiator dust and her mother'shand cream and, underneath all of it, something olderand unnameable that was just the house being thehouse she had grown up in.Her mother hugged her too long in the hallway, theway she always did, holding on a beat pastcomfortable so that Olivia had to be the one to end it.Then she turned to Damien and took both his hands inboth of hers and looked up at him and said, you arevery tall, which was her mother's entire approvalsystem delivered as raw data, and accepted the tin ofmince pies without a single word about the fact thatthey were plainly from a bakery, which meant she hadclocked it in half a second and chosen grace, whichwas so precisely her mother that Olivia had to busyherself with the coats.Her father shook Damien's hand in the front room andsaid, good drive.
Staying with him CHAPTER 33-The Drive Up
You are doing it again, Damien said, somewhere pastOxford.Doing what.The thing where you are extremely calm aboutsomething you are not calm about. You went very stillabout twenty minutes ago. You have been watchingthe motorway like it owes you money.They were on the M40 with the boot full of presentsand a tin of mince pies sitting on the back seat thatOlivia had bought from a good bakery and decantedinto one of her own tins, which she had decided wasnot deception so much as a small mercy to everyoneinvolved, including herself. The rain had set in pastBeaconsfield and had not let up, the wipers keepingtheir patient time, the country going by flat and greyand enormous. He was driving. She had offered, at theflat, and he had said he liked driving, and she had lethim have it, which two years ago she could not havedone.I am not nervous, she said.You changed your jumper twice this morning.That was temperature.The flat was twenty degrees. You stood in front of thewardr
Staying with him Chapter 10: Too Loud
She noticed it on a Tuesday.Not that it started on a Tuesday. It had been coming for a while — she knew that, she was a therapist, she understood the mechanics of denial better than most people — but Tuesday was the day she ran out of road.She was sitting across from a client. A woman in her earl
Staying with him CHAPTER 9: Outside
It was his idea.She was on the sofa on a Saturday afternoon with nothing scheduled and the particular restlessness that came from having nowhere to be and too much to think about, and he came out of his room in a jacket and looked at her and said come on like it was already decided.“Where?” she s
Staying with him CHAPTER 8: No Excuse
She had a perfectly good reason to go back to her own bed that night.Her apartment was ready. Her keys were at reception. Her sheets were clean and her pillows were hers and her routine — the one she had spent three years perfecting — was waiting for her exactly as she had left it, patient and und
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
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