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CHAPTER 84-The Dreaded Day
publish date:
2026-07-10 21:36:26
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Staying with him CHAPTER 123- The Room
cleared the second bedroom on a Saturday inSeptember when she was seven months pregnant andthe clearing could no longer be postponed by thepretence that they had more time.She had been aware of this for several weeks — thepostponing and the pretence — and she had allowed itbecause she understood that the clearing was notjust the clearing. The clearing was the finalacknowledgement that the thing was coming, thephysical making-room, and you did not make room forsomething until you were ready to let it arrive. Theyhad been ready for months. They had not been readyto clear the room until now.The room had contained, over five years of the flatbeing theirs: the books that had been read and notrehomed, which had accumulated in a specific cornerand had now been relocated to shelves in the livingroom and the hallway; the suitcases they used twice ayear, which went under the bed in the main bedroomand would stay there indefinitely; the Christmasdecorations in the well-organ
Staying with him CHAPTER 122- Diana's Hands
Diana came on a Wednesday afternoon in August,which was unusual — Diana usually came wheninvited for specific occasions, the Christmases andthe events, the meals planned in advance with thespecific preparation Diana brought to the occasionsshe marked. She did not usually appear on aWednesday afternoon in August withoutannouncement.She appeared on a Wednesday afternoon in Augustwithout announcement.Olivia answered the door and Diana was there with abag and the expression of a woman who had decidedto make a trip and had made it.I was in the area, Diana said.Olivia had been to Lewisham many times and knewthat Diana's house in Lewisham was not in the area oftheir flat in any meaningful sense. She did not saythis.Come in, she said.Diana came in. She looked at the flat the way shealways looked at the flat, with the gathering-assessment, the cataloguing of what was where andwhat it said about the people who lived there. She hadbeen looking at the flat this way for five
Staying with him CHAPTER 121-Priya At Month Five
Priya came over on a Saturday in July when Olivia wasfive months pregnant and visibly so, the composedprofessional exterior having given way, over thepreceding weeks, to something that could not becomposed or managed or maintained at a carefulremove because it was a physical fact and the bodyhad made its decision about the fact withoutconsulting the person who lived in it.She had been watching Priya navigate the flat in thethree months since Olivia's pregnancy became visible,the specific quality of Priya's attention, which was thesame as it had always been — full, direct, present —but had acquired a new texture, the texture of awoman who had been watching her best friend fortwelve years and was now watching her best friend inthe condition she had wondered about for most ofthose twelve years.Whether Olivia Reyes would have a baby.She had not said this out loud. Priya was the onlyperson who would not have said it out loud, the onlyperson who had been watching long en
Staying with him CHAPTER 120- His Coaching, Her Practice
On a Thursday in September she had four sessionsand he had two groups with the under-sixteens andone individual conversation with Leon that ran twentyminutes past when it was supposed to end.She knew about the Leon conversation because hetold her when he got home, which was what they did,the exchange of the day's things over dinner, and sheknew about the content of the conversation in the wayshe knew about the academy things, which was in thetexture of it rather than the specifics, the quality ofwhat he said about Leon telling her everything sheneeded to know about the conversation's significancewithout requiring her to know the details.They had found the rhythm of this over the course ofthe pregnancy, which had extended over months andhad changed the quality of the evenings. The eveningsof the pregnancy were different from the eveningsbefore the pregnancy. She had noticed this and filed itwithout examining it for a while and then in August,lying on the sofa on a Tu
Staying with him CHAPTER 119- What She Tells Her Clients
The last client she told was the Thursday client, inJuly, and she told that one last for reasons she hadthought about carefully and arrived at over severalweeks of thinking about the specific person and whatthe specific information would do in the specificroom.She had told the others over the spring and into thesummer, one by one, in the ways that were right foreach person, and each telling had been its own smallevent with its own particular arc, the way everysignificant thing in the consulting room had its ownarc, the conversation about a thing becoming its ownkind of work. She had not expected this. She hadexpected the telling to be a disclosure and atransition, the practical management of the fact, thematter-of-fact informing of people who needed toknow. She had not expected the telling to be useful inthe ways that it turned out to be useful.The first client she told, in May, was the one who hadlost a pregnancy. She had been thinking about thistelling for months
Staying with him CHAPTER 118- The Scan
held his hand in the waiting room.This was not usual for her, the waiting room of amedical building. She was a person who waited inwaiting rooms with her phone or with nothing,contained, self-sufficient in the specific way she hadbeen self-sufficient in most rooms for most of heradult life. She was not usually a person who neededto hold someone's hand in a waiting room.She held his hand.He held hers back in the way he held things thatmattered, with the full settled weight of him, notperforming the holding, just holding.The waiting room had four other people in it and atelevision mounted in the corner playing somethingwith the sound off. The chairs were the standardchairs, plastic and institutional, the same chairs thatappeared in waiting rooms all over the country asthough there had been a single procurement decisionmade about waiting rooms somewhere in the 1980sand no one had revisited it since. She had a specificrelationship with institutional chairs. She sat in one
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
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