All Chapters of Staying with him: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

woke before the alarm.This was not unusual — she had been waking before the alarm since the baby, the bodyhaving recalibrated its sleep architecture around the specific needs of a person whomight need something at any hour, the recalibration having become so complete thatshe now woke at approximately five forty-five regardless of whether the baby neededanything, the body checking in and finding nothing required and staying awake anyway,in the specific state of a person whose sleep had become permeable in a way it had notbeen before.She lay in the unfamiliar dark of the new bedroom and she let it be unfamiliar.The unfamiliar dark of a new bedroom was a specific quality she had encountered before— in hotels and in the rooms of visiting and in the nights she had spent in other people’shouses across the years. She had learned, over those encounters, that the unfamiliardark of a new bedroom resolved into the familiar dark of a known bedroom through theaccumulation of nights,

She put it up on the fifth day.She had been stepping around it for four days, the curtain rail on the hallway floor of thenew house, the specific object she had taken from the flat’s hallway wall on the day ofthe move, which she had decided in the autumn and executed with the screwdriver shehad left in her bag specifically for this purpose. Four days of stepping around it whileeverything else in the hallway was arranged and put in place.The hall table was in place. The bowl was on the hall table. The hooks for the coats wereon the wall. The hallway had the quality of a hallway that was becoming their hallway,the arriving-at of the arrangement that was going to be the arrangement.She had left the curtain rail for the fifth day.On the fifth day she got the screwdriver.She had the screwdriver she had used at the flat. The same screwdriver. She had put itin the bag when she took the rail down and she had kept it in the bag across the movingand the first four days and on the f

She walked on a Tuesday in February.Not the first steps — the first steps had been in January, in the flat’s second bedroom,before the move, the specific event that had arrived before they expected it in the waythat the baby’s events tended to arrive, on the baby’s schedule rather than anyoneelse’s. She had taken three steps toward him in the second bedroom before the move,three steps across the rug, and then sat down with the expression of a person who hadjust discovered something significant and was not yet sure what to do with thediscovery.She had not walked consistently until February.February was when the walking became the way she moved, not the occasional threesteps as experiment but the deliberate walking as method, the preferred mode of transitthrough the new house. She walked across the kitchen toward the bowl she hadidentified as interesting. She walked down the hallway toward the front door, which shealso found interesting. She walked into the living room and

Leon came on a Saturday in May when he was nineteen.Not to the academy — he had been coming to the academy since he was sixteen and theacademy visits were what they were, the professional relationship between the playerand the coach, the sessions and the conversations and the curriculum. This wasdifferent. He came to the house.He had called on the Wednesday and asked Damien if he could come on Saturday, whichwas itself different from all the previous ways Leon had communicated, the text in themornings before sessions and the brief conversations after, all of which had been in theprofessional register of the player-coach relationship. He had called on a Wednesdayand asked if he could come on Saturday, which was the register of a person who neededa conversation outside the professional context.She made tea.This was the right thing to do. She had made tea for many people in many kitchens atmany different stages of things requiring tea, and Leon arriving on a Saturday with a

The session that marked something happened on a Thursday in September.She had been doing Thursdays since she returned from leave in March and theThursdays had been the Thursdays they always were, the specific quality of the last dayof her working week, the accumulation of the Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday sessionsand the quality they produced by the afternoon of the third day, the tiredness and thesatisfaction of three days of the work done.The session was not the last of the day.It was the third, out of four, which was the position in the schedule where sessionssometimes produced the specific quality of surprise, the thing arriving in the thirdsession that you had not seen coming from the first or second, the way the worksometimes worked.She was with a client she had been seeing for eight months.The client was a woman of thirty-eight who had come to the practice with the specificpresenting issue of difficulty in her closest relationships, the specific pattern of closerelat