All Chapters of Staying with him: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

She went on a Thursday morning, which was whenshe always went to the academy on purpose ratherthan by accident, and she went early, before thesessions began, because she wanted Marcus beforethe day had any demands on him.She had thought about how to do this for a week. Notanxiously, not with the architecture of preparation shehad once built around important conversations, but inthe particular way she thought about things thatdeserved the right approach. She had told him aboutthe retirement in a kitchen. She had told him about thewedding over tea. She had told him about Damien'shealth concerns in a car park. But this was differentfrom all of those. This was not news about Damienprimarily. This was news about her. News that camefrom the part of her life that was hers and that shehad, over five years, chosen to share with Marcus inthe specific limited way that two people shared thingswhen one of them was the coach and the other wasthe person the coach had been watching

She named it on a Wednesday evening in June whenthe light was going long and warm through the flat'skitchen window and she was in the flat's secondtrimester and she was eight weeks pregnant and shehad been carrying the fear for five weeks and haddecided, the way she decided things that had beenheld long enough, that tonight was the night to put itdown.She had been naming fears for five years. She wasgood at it now, the way she was good at the thingsshe had done consistently for five years, the way yougot good at anything when you did it consistently andwith full attention. She had named the fear of the city.The fear of the closed door. The fear at four in themorning before the wedding. She had named the fearto her supervisor and to Priya and to him, in thekitchen and in cars and in the dark at three in themorning when it arrived without warning. She wasgood at naming fears.This one she had been holding back from namingbecause it was the specific one, the Olivia fea

January arrived in the flat with the quality of a thingthat was almost something else.Not almost spring. Too cold for that, the January thatfollowed the autumn of the pregnancy, the Januarythat arrived when she was thirty-five weeks along andthe birth was somewhere in the next five weeks andthe flat had already been reorganised twice and thearmchair from Damien's old flat had found its finalposition, against the wall of the second bedroom,which was no longer the room for things withoutbetter places but was the room that was about tobecome the thing it was always supposed to be.She sat at the kitchen table on the morning of the firstof January with her hands around a cup of tea and theflat around her in its specific January quiet.He was doing the stretch at the counter. The dailymaintenance of the body, the hands flat on theworktop and the breath going out slow, the hiprequiring its morning attention the way it had for yearsnow. She had watched him do this across so

Maya arrived on a Saturday in April with a large bagand a list and the expression of a woman who hadbeen waiting for exactly this occasion and was notgoing to let it pass without making the most of it.The bag contained: a specific brand of ginger biscuitsthat Maya had determined were superior to all otherbrands on the basis of extensive trial in the firsttrimester of her own pregnancy, a hot water bottlethat Maya had decided was essential and which Oliviahad told her she already owned and which Maya hadbrought anyway on the grounds that owning one andhaving the right one were different things, a bookabout birth that Maya had highlighted so extensively itwas essentially a different book, a small lavenderthing whose purpose Olivia could not immediatelyidentify but which Maya explained at length, and acontainer of something she had made at home andwhich she said Olivia must eat even if she did notwant to because the specific combination ofingredients was necessary for

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