All Chapters of Staying with him: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

123 Chapters

CHAPTER 91-All The Edges

She had always known what day it was going to be aparticular kind of day.Not prescience, nothing dramatic. Just the specificquality of a Tuesday in November when the light wasa certain colour coming through the curtains and theflat had the particular warmth of a morning they wereboth in with nowhere to be, a rare thing, a thing thathappened maybe twice a month and always felt like agift the calendar had accidentally given them.She woke before him, which she always did, and shelay in the specific warmth of a Tuesday with nowhereto be and she looked at the ceiling and she thoughtabout how well she knew this man.She knew the way he breathed in sleep, the slightchange when he was moving toward waking. Sheknew the order he did the morning in, from theparticular sound of his feet on the floor to the coffeeto the counter stretch to the second coffee, invariable,the sequence of the body that had been aprofessional athlete's for fifteen years and could notfully stop being o

CHAPTER 92-Diana At Christmas

They went to Lewisham.She had been to Diana's house twice before, the firsttime in chapter three of their story and the second ayear after that, but she had never been to it atChristmas, and Diana's house at Christmas was adifferent thing from Diana's house at other times, notlouder exactly but denser, every surface holdingsomething, the accumulated decoration of forty yearsof Christmases in the same rooms, each one adecision made at some point and not revised.Diana opened the door in an apron, which she had notbeen wearing on either of the previous visits, and shelooked at them with the assessment she always gave,the gathering of the facts of them, and she noddedonce and said, good, and stepped back to let them in.The house smelled of the thing she was cooking,which was complex and multi-layered in the way ofsomeone who had started very early in the morningand intended to arrive somewhere specific by theevening, and underneath the cooking the particularsmell of a

CHAPTER 93-January

The new year arrived quietly in the flat and she wentback to work on the second Monday and sat in thechair across from a woman she had been seeing forthree months and understood, in the session,something she had not understood before.The client was talking about learning to accept help. Itwas not a new conversation — they had been havingthis conversation in different forms since October, thecircling approach to a thing the woman had been toldwas weakness and had decided to prove was not, theslow work of dismantling a belief that had beenstructural for thirty-five years. She had heard thisconversation before from this particular woman andfrom many others like her, the woman who gave andgave and had organised her life around the giving andcould not, without enormous effort and shame,receive.She had heard this conversation before.She was hearing it differently in January.The woman said, I think I have been confusing beingneeded with being loved. She said it carefully,

CHAPTER 94- His Favourite Thursday

The thing about Thursdays was that they werenobody's best day.She had observed this across years of practice, thespecific quality of Thursday as a day the week hadalready started to leave, not quite the home stretchbut not the middle either, the day that could go eitherway. Most of her most diﬃcult sessions wereThursdays. Most of her breakthroughs wereThursdays too. The day had an honesty to it, a lack ofperformance. By Thursday people were too tired tomanage the front and they said the true thing.She had started to think of her own life in Thursdays.His Thursday began at six forty-five because thealarm did not know it was Thursday, and she heardhim get up and do the sequence, the coffee and thecounter and the second coffee, and she lay in the sixforty-five dark and listened to the flat around him, thespecific sound of a Thursday in their life.He left at seven twenty. She heard the keys and thedoor and then the building sounds, his footsteps onthe stairs fading, an

CHAPTER 95-What Stays

She found herself at the window on a Sunday morningin February thinking about what had stayed.Not a deliberate inventory. Not the managed taking-stock of a woman who needed to account for things.Just the quiet arrival of it, the way thoughts arrived onSunday mornings when the flat was warm andnothing was required of either of them and she hadcoffee and the window and the winter city doing itssparse February thing below.What had stayed.The keys in the bowl. She had bought the bowl in ashop on a Tuesday because the keys had been goingon the counter and the counter was not the rightplace. She had not thought of it as a small permanentthing at the time. It had become one.The photograph on the shelf. Amara in her smallwooden frame, the woman who had laughed with herwhole face. She had put the frame there three yearsago, after finding the photograph at the bottom of adrawer, because it belonged in the open rather than adrawer, and it had been there ever since, part of th

CHAPTER 96- Twelve Years

Priya came over on a Saturday in March with nothingplanned and no agenda, which was how Priyaoperated when something was on her mind and shedid not want to make it an occasion by saying so inadvance.She arrived at eleven with the coffee she had boughton the way, not from the corner shop, the good one,the one three streets further that cost more and wasworth it on the days when the coffee was the pointrather than the caffeine. She had done this twicebefore in twelve years, the deliberate getting of thegood coffee before arriving somewhere. Once whenOlivia had the diﬃcult case in year three and hadcalled at midnight. Once when Priya's own mother hadsaid the thing that required sitting with.Today was a third occasion.Damien took one look at the two of them and said hehad things to do at the academy and would be backfor lunch, which was not true on a Saturday but whichwas the kind of thing he said when he understood thatthe flat needed to be theirs for a few hours. She

CHAPTER 97-The Player

His name was Leon and he was sixteen and he wasthe kind of player who made the other sixteen-year-olds look like they were playing a different game. Notthe kind of player Damien usually found himself mostinterested in — not the serious one at the back, notthe boy who needed someone to know the differencebetween diﬃcult and serious. Leon was obviouslygifted. The gift was loud and visible and alreadydrawing attention from people above Marcus'sacademy, the conversations Damien was increasinglythe one taking because Marcus did not take themfrom his chair.What interested Damien about Leon was not the gift.It was what Leon did not know about the gift.He told her on a Wednesday evening, which wasunusual — the academy conversations were usuallyThursday. He came home from a later session and satdown and said, the boy with the left foot. I have beenwatching him for two months.Leon, she said. The one Marcus called inevitable.Leon, he said. He sat with it for a moment. You kno

CHAPTER 98- Just This

She came to bed before him on a Wednesday inNovember and lay in the dark listening to the flat.The sounds of it. The specific catalogue of soundsshe had learned over four years, the particular creakof the third board in the hallway, the way the heatingclicked when it adjusted, the low sound of him in theliving room reading, the muﬄed sound of the citybeyond the window going about its Wednesdayevening business. She had not noticed these soundsin the beginning. They had been part of thebackground hum of the space, undifferentiated, thenoise of a flat she was still telling herself wastemporary, that would soon resolve back into the quietshe had kept for three years in the one across the hall.She had been wrong about that. The flat had notresolved into the quiet. The flat had become home,gradually and without announcement, the soundsbecoming part of her the way sounds did when aplace was yours, when the creaks and clicks were nolonger surprising but simply the voice of

CHAPTER 99- October Again

noticed the quality of the light first, which washow she always noticed October.Not the temperature, not the leaves, not the clockspreparing to go back. The light. The specific low goldangle of it at nine in the morning through the kitchenwindow, the October light that was different fromSeptember light in a way she could not havedescribed to someone who had not stood at thiswindow across four consecutive Octobers and felt thedifference in the body.Four Octobers.She stood at the window with her coffee and she letthat be what it was, the four Octobers at this window,the accumulation of them, without making itceremonial or examining it too closely. She wasgetting better at letting things be what they werewithout needing to process them immediately intomeaning.He came in from the run. She heard the door, the keysin the bowl, the trainers coming off with the particulareﬃciency of a man who had been taking trainers offat the same door for four years and had no excessm

CHAPTER 100- The Morning

She was on the sofa with her feet tucked under herand the coffee going cold in her hands and him on theother end watching something on the television thatshe had decided not to watch with him.She was watching it.She was not going to tell him she was watching it.She was going to keep her eyes on the page in her lapand watch the television in her peripheral vision andmaintain the established position that she wasreading and had no interest in whatever he had put on,which she had heard him described to Marcus on thephone as a documentary about something she hadnot paid attention to because she had been reading atthe time and genuinely not interested.She was interested now.Something had happened on the screen that hadmade him sit forward very slightly, the shift sherecognised as the arriving of something he had notexpected, and she had looked up from the page to seewhat it was and now she could not look back down atthe page without having seen it, which meant thereadi

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