All Chapters of Staying with him: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

She had not expected to feel anything about leaving.It was a practical matter. The lease was up. She was moving sixfeet across a hallway into an apartment she had been sleeping in everynight for four months and which contained the majority of herbelongings and both of her favourite coffee cups and a shelf in thebathroom with her name on it in every sense except the literal one.There was nothing to feel. She was an adult. She was organised. Shehad moved before.She went into the apartment on the Thursday evening to get thelast of it — a box of kitchen things she had been meaning to bringover, the lamp from the bedroom that she liked better than any of his,the plant that had somehow survived the abandonment — and shestood in the middle of the living room after she had packed everythingand felt things anyway.The apartment was empty in the way that spaces became emptywhen the person who made them a home had already mostly left. Thewalls had lighter patches where the picture

March became April and her name went on the lease and she did notmake a ceremony of it.The letting agent sent a form. She filled it in. He countersigned.She got a confirmation email with her name typed neatly beside his inthe cold administrative language of a tenancy agreement and she satwith it for a moment — Olivia Reyes, right there, official andpermanent — and felt something quieter and more complete than shehad expected.Then she got on the tube and went to work.It looked like this, the life they had.She still had her practice in Islington, still the same tube line, stillthe same walk from the station that she had done enough times now tostop being a route and become simply the way she went. She wasbetter at her work than she had been in years. More present, moreavailable, less of her attention quietly leaking away into thebackground maintenance of her own carefully managed interior life.The maintenance had stopped because the thing being maintained hadresolved it

She found the photograph on a Saturday morning in May, clearing outa drawer that had been hers for two months but had been his first, andat the bottom of it, underneath receipts and a cable she could notidentify and a pen with no lid, there was a photograph.She picked it up.Him, younger. She could tell by something less settled in his face— the early twenties version of him, before whatever it was that hadmade him the particular quality of still and certain that she had cometo know so well. His arm around a woman she did not recognise. Bothof them laughing at something outside the frame, the kind of laughthat could not be performed, the kind that arrived whole andimmediate before you had decided to have it.The woman was beautiful. Dark-skinned, natural hair pulled backloosely, the kind of person who looked right in whatever she had onwithout appearing to have thought about it. Her laugh was her wholeface. There was something in the photograph — some quality of easebetw

The fight started over a pan left in the sink and was not about the panat all and they both knew it from about thirty seconds in.She had a difficult week. Not dramatically difficult — no crisis,nothing that would have registered to anyone watching from outside.Just the accumulative weight of a stretch where several things hadbeen harder than usual simultaneously and she had been less presentat home than she wanted to be and she knew it and had not had theenergy to do anything about the gap between what she wanted andwhat she was managing.He had a pulled hip flexor. Not serious — the physio had beenclear, it would resolve, he just needed to modify training for a weekand be careful. He was being careful and he hated being careful.Physical limitation was the specific thing that made him shorter thanusual, more internal, less available, and he was taking it sideways inthe small ways he took things sideways when he was not payingattention to himself.They had been moving aro

October again. The leaves going gold and the light going low andLondon doing its brief reluctant beautiful thing before the grey cameback and stayed.She was at the kitchen window with her first coffee when hecame in from his run. She heard the door, the keys in the bowl — theyhad a bowl for keys now, she had bought it in August, one more smallpermanent thing in a life that had become full of them — and thetrainers coming off and him moving through the apartment toward herin the unhurried solid way of someone who was comfortableeverywhere he was.He came up behind her and put his arms around her.She leaned back into him without thinking about it, which wasitself the whole story — the not thinking about it, the way it hadbecome reflex, the way his arms around her was simply somethingthat happened now and her body's response was to lean.They looked out the window together. Below, the street wasdoing its Tuesday morning thing. A woman with a pushchairnegotiating a kerb. A