Todos os capítulos de Staying with him: Capítulo 141 - Capítulo 150

She went back in March, at four months.Not full-time — full-time was a later conversation, possibly a never conversation, aconversation she was not going to have with herself until she had been part-time forlong enough to know what part-time asked of her and what it left. She went back threedays a week, Tuesday through Thursday, nine to four, which gave her Monday and Fridayand both weekend days and the mornings and evenings of the three days and all thetime that was not the consulting room for the other person, the person she was at homeand in the second bedroom with the armchair and in the kitchen making the soup shehad been making more of since the pregnancy and in the mornings at the window withthe coffee that was no longer going cold because she drank it now.She went back on a Tuesday in March.The practice door said both names, Reyes and Cole, the way it had said both namessince January, and she stood at the door for a moment before going in, which wassomething she h

The call came on a Sunday at seven forty-three in the morning.She knew before he answered it. She was not a person who believed in premonitions.She was a person who understood that the body knew things before the conscious minddid, the body that had been attending to the patterns of a life for long enough to readthe departure from the pattern before it was explicit. The specific quality of the Sundaymorning, the quality of the phone on his side of the bed, the way he moved to answer it— she knew.He answered.She lay in the bed and she listened to his side of the call, which was nothing. A silence. Along silence. Not the silence of a call that had not yet connected or the silence oflistening. The silence of a man receiving something.He said: when.He said: alright.He said: thank you.He put the phone down.He sat on the edge of the bed.She waited.He said Marcus’s name.Just the name. Not a sentence around it, not an explanation. Just the name, said in thespecific way you

It was small.This was what Marcus had wanted, Damien knew, because Marcus had told him, once, inthe specific off-hand way Marcus said the things he had been thinking about for a longtime: if something happens, small. The players I made. Nobody else.Small was how it was.The chapel was not full. It was not supposed to be full. It was the people who needed tobe there and not the people who would have come because it was the occasion to cometo. The people who needed to be there were a specific and particular group, connectedto the man in the specific and particular way that forty years of the right work producedconnections.The players he made.They came from different decades.The ones from the nineties were forty now, some of them. She had seen a photograph ofone of them on the wall of Marcus’s office at the academy, a photograph she had lookedat many times without registering the age of the player in it, and the player was now inthe chapel at forty, the specific quality of

He read it to her in the dark.Not the night he found it. Months after the finding. She had not known when he wasgoing to read it to her and she had not asked, which was the right approach, which wasthe approach of a person who had learned when asking was the right thing and when thewaiting was. She had waited.She had been in bed, one evening in October, when he came in from the other roomwhere he had been after the baby was asleep, and he sat on the edge of the bed and hesaid: I want to read you something.She sat up.He had the note in his hand. The piece of paper from the filing cabinet that had been inhis jacket pocket and then somewhere she did not know and now in his hand.She did not turn on the lamp.The dark seemed right.He unfolded the paper.He read it.He read most of it quietly, not sharing the reading, and she sat in the dark and she lethim read it, let him have the whole of it for himself first, which was his by right.And then he found the line.She knew when

Diana called on a Wednesday in June.She did not call often. She appeared, in the specific Diana way, at the occasions thatrequired appearing at and she called on Sunday mornings at the time that had beenestablished across thirty-three years of Sunday morning calls. The Wednesday call wasnot the Sunday call. It was the other kind.Damien answered.She heard his side of the call from the kitchen, the low Diana-call voice, but theconversation was shorter than the Sunday calls. He came in and he said, she is comingSaturday.Just her, Olivia said. Not an occasion.He looked at her.Just her, he said.Diana arrived on Saturday afternoon with a specific quality that Olivia associated withDiana on the occasions when she was going to say a thing she had been preparing for awhile. She had come to the flat before the baby and she had come after the baby andshe had come for the Christmases and she had sat at kitchen tables and said good in thetone and she had put her hands on Olivia’s s