All Chapters of Staying with him: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

The autumn arrived with a particular quality thatDamien had not expected: it felt like his.Not in the possessive way, not in the way of a manclaiming territory. In the way that a season felt likeyours when you had been in a specific place longenough for it to return and find you settled. Theprevious autumn had been the first full-time one, theone where every week brought something he had notanticipated, Marcus's filing system and the parentwho emailed daily and the under-seventeen whostopped attending for six days before anyone noticedand the calibration of how much you could push asixteen-year-old in October versus February. He hadspent that autumn learning the shape of the thing.This autumn he knew the shape.He left at six fifty on Monday mornings because theMonday traffic required the extra five minutes and hehad worked that out in week three of the previous yearand had not been late since. He knew which of theunder-sixteens would need a conversation at the endof

The dinner was Remi's idea, which meant it was theonly idea, because when Remi had an idea about agathering she did not propose it as much asannounce it, and you found yourself on a particularevening at a particular place without quiteunderstanding how you had arrived there or at whatpoint the optional had become a given.The particular place was the first café, which waseighteen months old now and had the specificconfident warmth of a room that had survived its firstyear and knew it was going to survive the next oneand the one after that. There was a quality thatspaces acquired when the initial uncertainty hadresolved, when the people who worked in them hadfound their rhythms and the people who came tothem had found their tables and the whole thing hadbecome what it was going to be rather than what itmight be. The first café had that quality. Remi hadclosed it for the evening, which she had not donebefore and which told Olivia, before she had been toldanything, tha

She had been watching since February, when she firstnoticed the chair differently.Not the chair itself. She had watched Marcus use theplastic chair at the edge of the far pitch since Octoberof the previous year, the slow delegation of thestanding to occasions that specifically required it, thehip and the body setting the terms now rather than thewill. She and Damien had both noticed the chair andwere both not saying anything, moving around it withthe particular carefulness of two people watchingsomething they were not yet ready to name. Notavoidance. Just the waiting for the right moment, theunderstanding that the naming of a thing changed it.What she noticed in February was something elseentirely.She was at the academy on a Thursday afternoon todrop off documents Marcus had asked her to helphim navigate, a registration matter that had arrived inthe post in an envelope with a government crest andthat Marcus had handed her at dinner four weeks agowith the expression

They drove up on the twenty-second and her motherhad been cooking since half past seven and the housesmelled of the specific combination that meant shehad been in the kitchen all morning with opinionsabout everything coming out of it and was notinterested in suggestions.Fifth December together. She had been thinking aboutthe number on the drive up, watching the motorwayunwind the way it always did, the country flattening asthey went north. Five Decembers. The first she hadbeen nervous and the managing of it had been visibleto her in retrospect, the way the managing of thingswas always more visible in retrospect than in themoment. The second was the year of the city and thedecision made together at a table. The third their firstmarried Christmas, the door closed, the draught gone.The fourth the retirement still recent, both of them inthe transition period, the academy new and the flatstill adjusting to the different mornings. The fifth —this one — felt like simply go

She did not build up to it.She had thought, on the tube, that she might need to.That she would sit him down and there would besome sort of approach to the thing, some preparationof the room for the sentence, the preamble, the wayshe had always built architecture around theimportant statements. She had spent years not doingthat, years of learning to say the important thing whenit was ready rather than when the architecture aroundit was complete. She did not do it now. She camethrough the door and he looked at her and thearchitecture was entirely unnecessary.I am pregnant, she said.He went still.Not the surprise-still, though surprise was part of it.The other kind of still, the kind she had come to knowas his first and truest response to something thatrequired the full weight of his attention beforeanything else could happen. She had seen this still inkitchens and in cars and in a registry office in the rain.The stillness of a man receiving something true. Thestillnes