All Chapters of Staying with him: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

She had been waiting for the right moment for threeweeks and then she stopped waiting for the rightmoment because she understood, on a Thursdayevening in late January, that waiting for the rightmoment was the old thing, the managed version, theone where she decided in advance what the occasionneeded to look like before she let herself be in it.She came home from work and put her keys in thebowl and stood in the hallway for a moment. The ringwas on the shelf where she had left it, in the small bagfrom the shop, next to Amara's photograph. She hadput it there the day she bought it and she had lookedat it every day since, the small ordinary fact of itsitting on the shelf, waiting.She picked it up.He was in the kitchen. She could hear him, the soundof the counter, which she had learned to identify theway she identified all his sounds, the specific clunk ofthe worktop when his palms went flat on it. She stoodin the hallway with the bag in her hand and she tookthe box ou

She had imagined planning a wedding would feel likea project. She had been a person who was good atprojects, the mapping of them, the organisation ofvariables into a manageable sequence, the controlledexecution from beginning to end. She had plannedthings her whole professional life and she had beengood at it and she had assumed, somewhere in theback of her mind, that the wedding would be thesame.It was not a project.It was a series of small decisions that each oneseemed ordinary and together they becamesomething, and the becoming was not planned, itsimply happened, and the only thing she could controlwas whether she ran it or whether she was in it, andshe chose to be in it, which meant some things wentwrong in small ways and none of it mattered.Small, they had said from the beginning. A registryoffice and then a long lunch in the private room abovethe pub they had eaten at on a hundred Fridayevenings, the one where they knew both their namesand the table by the win

She stayed at Priya's the night before, which neither ofthem had suggested in advance and both of themwanted, and it was like being nineteen except forevery way in which it was not.They opened a bottle of wine that was better thananything they had drunk at nineteen, and they sat atPriya's kitchen table which was a different kitchentable in a different flat from the one they had sharedwith a broken boiler and strong opinions abouteverything, and Olivia looked at her oldest friendacross it and thought about how long they had beenat kitchen tables together.Twelve years, she said.Of tables, Priya confirmed. You, me, various tables.She looked at the wine. The boiler flat table was theone with the wobble. We put a folded piece of cardunder one leg for the entire year we lived there and itnever fixed it.I still do that, Olivia said. Out of habit.I noticed when I came to yours, Priya said. You haddone it to the kitchen table even though the table didnot wobble. She smiled

The week after the wedding was the most ordinaryweek of her life and she felt every part of it.Not ordinary in the sense of nothing happening.Things happened, the usual small machinery of a lifein motion, the clients and the tube and the coffee andthe post in the bowl and the flat doing what the flatdid. But the week had a quality of ordinary she had notexperienced before, a density of it, the everydayarriving with the specific texture of a life that hadfinally fully settled on itself. Like a house that hasbeen stood in long enough to stop creaking.She noticed it on the Tuesday. She was on the tubegoing to work and she looked at her hand and therewas the ring and she thought, I am married, and thethought was not large, not extraordinary, not chargedwith the weight of the occasion. It was simply true.She was a married woman on the Northern line on aTuesday morning and the world was going about itsbusiness and inside the plainness of the fact therewas something so ste

She had said she would go back. She had said it onthe last night of the first trip, sitting on the terrace inthe warm dark with his beer and her wine and the seasomewhere below them, and he had already beenlooking at flights on his phone before she finished thesentence. She had taken the phone out of his hand.Not yet, she had said. That was the first visit, whichmeant there was going to be a second one.The second one was May, three weeks after thewedding, because he had six weeks between theseason ending and pre-season beginning and neitherof them wanted to spend them indoors in Londonworking out how to be married in the abstract whenthey could go somewhere warm and work it out inpractice.The apartment was different. They had not been ableto get the same one, which she had initially foundannoying and had then understood was the rightthing, the not trying to recreate the first trip but goingto a different place with the same people and findingout what the different