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CHAPTER 29-One Year
publish date:
2026-06-17 16:37:49
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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 30-What Comes Next
October again. The leaves going gold and the light going low andLondon doing its brief reluctant beautiful thing before the grey cameback and stayed.She was at the kitchen window with her first coffee when hecame in from his run. She heard the door, the keys in the bowl — theyhad a bowl for ke
Staying with him CHAPTER 28-August
The fight started over a pan left in the sink and was not about the panat all and they both knew it from about thirty seconds in.She had a difficult week. Not dramatically difficult — no crisis,nothing that would have registered to anyone watching from outside.Just the accumulative weight of a
Staying with him CHAPTER 26-Amara
She found the photograph on a Saturday morning in May, clearing outa drawer that had been hers for two months but had been his first, andat the bottom of it, underneath receipts and a cable she could notidentify and a pen with no lid, there was a photograph.She picked it up.Him, younger. She c
Staying with him CHAPTER 25- The Night She Told Him Everything
It was a Wednesday in late April and she had sat with a client forninety minutes who reminded her of herself at twenty-four and shecame home feeling scraped out in the specific way that some sessionsleft her.Not badly. Not in a way that meant anything was wrong. Just theparticular texture of a
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