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CHAPTER 28-August
publish date:
2026-06-16 17:22:14
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Staying with him CHAPTER 154- The Right House
She found it on a Wednesday.Not a Saturday. Not the arranged arrangement. She found it on a Wednesday afternoonin November, alone, because she had been walking home from a session and had taken adifferent route and the different route had gone past a house with a sign outside it andshe had stopped.She had not been looking.She had been walking home.She stopped at the house with the sign outside it and she looked at the front of it, whichwas ordinary in the way that the right things were sometimes ordinary from the outside.A terrace. Red brick. A front path that needed attention. Two windows on the first floorwith the right light in them, the quality of the November light coming through thewindows at the angle that told her the light on the south side of this building was theright light at this time of day.She took out her phone.She looked up the listing.She stood on the pavement in November looking at the listing on her phone and she feltthe quality she had been waiting
Staying with him CHAPTER 153- Looking For A House
They went on Saturday mornings.This was the arrangement they arrived at after the first Saturday of looking, which hadbegun without an arrangement and had produced two viewings that they had scheduledindependently of each other and which had, logistically, produced the experience of twopeople who had not coordinated the managing of the baby and the looking, which wasnot difficult but was inefficient.She had come home from the second viewing on the first Saturday to find him in thegarden — not their garden, there was no their garden yet, she had come home to the flatand he was in the kitchen — with the baby and the quality of a man who had worked outan arrangement.Saturday mornings, he said. Both of us. Baby with Diana.Diana had not been consulted but Diana would be consulted and Diana would say goodand the Saturday mornings would proceed.So: Saturday mornings, both of them, beginning in October and proceeding through theautumn with the specific focus of two people who kn
Staying with him CHAPTER 152- The Decision
The decision arrived properly on a Sunday morning in September, which was differentfrom the conversation they had had on a Sunday morning in July, different in the waythat a conversation about wanting a thing was different from a decision to go and getthe thing.The July conversation had been the wanting.This was the getting.She knew the difference by the quality of what she felt. In July she had felt the gladnessof the conversation and the rightness of the wanting and the specific warmth of twopeople sitting across a kitchen table finding that they wanted the same thing. InSeptember she felt something more specific, the focused quality of a person who hasbeen thinking about something for two months and has thought it through far enough toknow exactly what she wants to do next.She said it over coffee.I want to start looking in October, she said.He was reading something and he looked up.October, he said.October is when we start, she said. She picked up her cup. I have be
Staying with him CHAPTER 151- What The Flat Holds
She went through it on a Thursday evening in August, the flat, room by room, not in thegoing-through-things way of someone preparing to leave but in the attending-to way,the specific quality of attention she had been developing for five years brought to bearon the space that had held the five years.He was at the academy. The baby was asleep. She had two hours.She started in the hallway.The hallway was narrow, which it had always been, and had the specific accumulatedquality of a hallway that two people had been moving through daily for five years, thecoats and the keys and the bowl and the quality of the light at different times of day. Shehad put up the curtain rail in the hallway in the first week, the rail that had nothing to dowith curtains and everything to do with deciding this space was going to hold her things.The curtain rail was still there. It had held various things across the years — his coat onthe hook beside hers, a bag she was not using but not ready to mov
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 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
Staying with him Chapter 2: The View
Three weeks.That’s how long Olivia lasted before she stopped filing noise complaints and accepted that Damien Cole was simply a fact of her life now — like traffic, or difficult clients, or the radiator that clicked every night at 2am. Unavoidable. Irritating. Something to be managed.She managed
Staying with him Chapter 3: Flooded
started with a sound.A low, persistent dripping that worked its way into Olivia’s sleep sometime around 3am and sat there until she couldn’t ignore it anymore. She opened her eyes to the dark ceiling, listened, and felt the specific dread of someone who already knows something is wrong before the
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