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CHAPTER 33-The Drive Up
publish date:
2026-06-21 21:14:49
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Staying with him CHAPTER 41- The Offer
She did not ask him that night.She had meant to. She went home from Priya's withthe whole sensible plan assembled in her head andher oldest friend's voice in her ear, ready, finally, to bea woman who said the frightened thing out loudbefore it grew teeth. And she let herself into the flatand he was in the bedroom on the phone with thedoor pulled most of the way to, and she heard thesharp voice, the Marcus voice, and she stopped in thehallway beside the shelf where Amara's photographsat in its small wooden frame, and she heard him sayit.She was not trying to listen. She would hold on to thatsmall, cold comfort in the days that followed. She wasnot crouched at the door. She was standing in herown hallway taking off her coat, and his voice carriedthe way every voice carried in that flat, and she heard,clearly, in the certain sharp register he kept for oneman alive:It is a serious offer, Marcus. I know it is. Three years. Iknow exactly what it is worth. A pause. The lo
Staying with him CHAPTER 40- Priya Says The Thing
You are doing the face, Priya said.I am not doing a face.You are absolutely doing the face. The managingface. I have known that face for eleven years. You didthat exact face at university when you found outabout the thing with Daniel, do you remember, youwent and made everyone tea and rearranged theentire kitchen and did not cry for nine days, and thencried, if memory serves, for about two.They were in Priya's kitchen, which was small andloud and the precise opposite of Olivia's flat, everysurface covered in a child's drawing or a singleabandoned sock, a bottle of wine open between themthat neither of them was really drinking because Priyahad to be up at six with the children. Olivia had comeover on a Wednesday evening without admittingclearly to herself why she had come.There is a thing, Olivia said.There is always a thing. You do not come over on aschool night because you are relaxed. Tell me thething.So she told her. The cream envelope on the second ofJanuary,
Staying with him CHAPTER 39- The Thing He Is Not Saying
By the middle of March she could no longer pretend,with any conviction, that she had not noticed.It had been building for the better part of two months,slowly enough that on any single day she couldpersuade herself she was imagining it, that he wastired, that the season was long, that she wasimporting tension that was not there. It was only whenshe let herself look at the whole two months laid endto end that she could see the line of it, the slow steadydecline of something in him that had nothing to dowith how he was with her.Because he was not unhappy with her. She was nearlycertain of that, and the nearly was its own smalltorment. He reached for her exactly as much as healways had. He came home the same, ate dinner thesame, slept with his arm out the same so she couldfind the space in the dark. Whatever the weight was, itwas not about them, and that single fact was the onlything that let her keep carrying it without coming apartat the seams.But he was carrying so
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 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 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
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 1: The Neighbor from Hell
Olivia had a system.Not in an obsessive way — or at least that’s what she told herself. It was just that life ran smoother when things were predictable. Coffee at seven, two cups, no sugar. Breakfast with something quiet playing in the background — Sade, maybe, or just the sound of the city waking
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