Lahat ng Kabanata ng The wife I forgot to love: Kabanata 151 - Kabanata 160

They walked one evening.It was a Wednesday. She had finished rehearsal at six and she had texted him and said I am walking home if you want to walk with me and he had been at the corner of the studio street at six fifteen.She had not asked how he had gotten there so fast. She did not need to ask.They walked.The city at six fifteen on a Wednesday was doing its commuter things. People finishing work and moving in the direction of home and the particular purposeful quality of a city at the end of a weekday. She knew this city. She had walked it at every hour for two years. She knew what it looked like in autumn at six fifteen and she knew what it smelled like and she knew which streets were worth taking the long way through.She took the long way.He walked beside her without commenting on the route.They talked about small things. She asked what he was reading. He told her. She said I read that three years ago. He said what did you think. She told him. He listened and said two thing

His fingers were still under mine. Neither of us moved. "Helena." "Don't." "I wasn't going to say anything." "You were about to." "Maybe." He didn't pull his hand away. I didn't pull mine. That was the problem with Damian. He never pushed. Never grabbed or rushed or made you feel like the room was too small. He just waited. Patient and steady and completely terrifying because of it. I was not patient. I was not steady. I stood up first. Walked to the kitchen because I needed somewhere to put myself that wasn't next to him on that sofa. "Tea's gone cold," I said. "Helena…” "Do you want more? I'm making more." I was already filling the kettle. He didn't answer. I turned around. He had moved. Not far. Just to the edge of the kitchen, one hand resting on the counter. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the shelf beside the stove. The rosemary jar. He went still. "You kept it," he said. "I told you I did." "Yeah." His voice came out low

He didn’t tell me where we were going. He just said come and held the passenger door open and I got in because something in the evening felt like it could hold one more thing. We drove without a lot of talking. The city thinned out. Trees came. Then a street I didn’t know and a row of houses with the kind of quiet that only existed in places people had lived in for a long time. He pulled up in front of a house with a blue door. Window boxes on every sill. Late flowers still holding on at the edge of the season, yellow and white and something purple I didn’t know the name of. I looked at the blue door. “Damian.” “Just come.” “You should have told me.” “You wouldn’t have come.” He wasn’t wrong. He knocked twice. I stood slightly behind him with my hands in my coat pockets and told myself this was fine. This was just a door. Just a house. Then it opened. Eleanor Graves was smaller than I remembered. Or maybe I had built her larger in my memory over two years of not se

I got home and stood in the dark for a while. Didn't turn the lights on. Didn't take my coat off. Just stood in the hallway with my keys in my hand and let the evening settle around me. It took a long time to settle. I moved eventually. Coat on the hook. Keys on the shelf. Glass of water at the kitchen window. The street below was quiet. A woman walking a dog. A light going off in the apartment across the road. The city moving the way it always did, indifferent and continuous, not waiting for anyone to be ready. I looked at the rosemary jars. Two of them. Right where they had been for two years. I had been staring at the email for eleven days. Pinnacle Productions. The biggest production company in the world. A new show. A-list cast. My name on a contract with a start date forty-three days away and a city that was not this one. Eleven days of opening it and closing it. Eleven days of telling myself I was thinking it through when what I was actually doing was

The building was bigger than I expected. I stood outside it for a moment before I went in. Just stood on the pavement with my one bag and looked up at the glass front of Pinnacle Productions and thought about the woman who used to apologise before anyone had even tasted her food. She would not have been able to walk through that door. I walked through the door. The day was enormous. Not in a way I could describe precisely. Just the particular enormity of a place that had been making things that mattered for longer than I had been alive and now had my name on a badge and a desk with my things on it and people who said your work on the documentary was what brought you here like it was a simple fact and not something I had built out of two years of becoming. I met the director. Elena had prepared me for directors but this one was different. Quieter. The kind of quiet that meant he was always thinking three scenes ahead. He shook my hand and said I’ve been waiting for someone w