Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Something has shifted.
It’s been four days since the text from Ross, and I’ve barely slept through any of them.
But I’m determined this won’t break me, won’t break the tentative steps Alex and I are taking to get things back on track.
This morning I wake up and Alex is still in bed beside me, his arm heavy across my waist, and I don’t move it.
I lie there and listen to him breathe. This is what I chose.
This is what I have. And despite the message sitting on my phone, I relax enough to take a full breath.
I make the decision before I even get up.
I’m going to try. Properly try, not the half-hearted motions I’ve been going through where I say the right things but my head is somewhere else.
Alex told me he wanted us to talk more, to stop orbiting each other like strangers who share a mortgage, and I nodded and said yes, and then I carried on exactly as before because Ross was taking up every spare inch of space in my brain.
Not any more.
I get up first and put the coffee on, then unload the dishwasher because it’s Alex’s least favourite job and he always does it without complaining.
The kitchen is quiet and grey with early light, and I move through it softly, mugs on to the shelf, plates stacked, the small satisfaction of putting things back where they belong.
When Alex comes downstairs in his work shirt, sleeves rolled up, hair still damp, I hand him a mug, and he looks at me like I’ve done something remarkable.
It breaks my heart a bit, that handing my husband a cup of coffee counts as remarkable.
But I smile, and he smiles back, and neither of us ruins it by saying anything too big.
‘Olivia’s got that geography project due,’ he says, leaning against the worktop. ‘Did she finish it?’
‘She says she has. Whether that means she’s actually finished it or she’s done two paragraphs and a title page is anyone’s guess.’
He laughs. ‘I’ll check it tonight.’
‘She’ll love that.’
‘She’ll hate it,’ he says. ‘But she’ll get a decent mark.’
‘You sound like your mother.’
‘Take that back immediately.’
I grin, and so does he. It feels so stupidly easy, standing here taking the mickey out of each other like we used to, that I wonder how we let it get so hard.
How I let it get so hard. Because it was me, mostly.
I know that. Alex was here the whole time, holding the door open, and I kept walking past it.
Olivia is waiting in the doorway, bag trailing off one shoulder, hair scraped into something that might once have been a ponytail.
She glances between us, clocking the fact that we’re standing close together, that we’re smiling, that nobody looks like they’re about to start an argument.
She doesn’t say anything about it. She just drops into a chair and asks if there’s toast.
I make her toast. Alex tops up his coffee.
Olivia eats with one hand and scrolls through her phone with the other.
Alex raises his eyebrows at me behind her head, and I mouth pick your battles.
He shakes his head but lets it go. We stand around the kitchen together, and it feels so ordinary and so fragile that I want to cup my hands around it like a candle flame and keep the draught out.
After they’ve gone – Olivia first, earbuds already in, door slamming behind her; Alex a minute later, kissing me on the cheek and squeezing my hand before he picks up his keys – I sit at my desk and open the cover design I’ve been avoiding all week.
A psychological thriller, ironically. Woman on a bridge, rain, blurred city lights.
The brief says ‘atmospheric and unsettling’, and I think I could design that in my sleep right now.
I work for two solid hours without checking my phone once.
The type sits exactly where I want it on the first attempt.
The colour palette comes together without the usual forty-seven revisions.
I send a first draft to the publisher, sit back, and feel competent for the first time in weeks.
Like I’m a person who can do things, not just a woman drowning in her own past.
When I finally pick up my phone, there’s nothing from Ross. No texts, no missed calls, no notification from a number I don’t recognise. Just a message from Alex – Hope today’s a good one x – and a reminder about Olivia’s friend coming over at the weekend.
I type back You too x and put the phone face down on the desk.
This is what normal feels like. I’d almost forgotten.
The thing about trying is that once you start, you notice how little effort it actually takes, and then you feel terrible about all the weeks you didn’t bother.
I cook dinner that evening instead of suggesting takeaway.
Nothing fancy – chicken stir-fry, the one where I use too much soya sauce and Olivia pretends to be appalled but always finishes her plate.
Alex opens a bottle of wine, and we eat at the table instead of on the sofa with the television on.
Olivia rolls her eyes but stays for twenty minutes before disappearing upstairs with her phone clamped in her fist.
After she’s gone, Alex reaches across and takes my hand.
‘This is nice,’ he says.
‘It is.’
‘I’ve missed this.’
My throat tightens. ‘Me, too.’
He runs his thumb across my knuckles. ‘I know things have been a bit off lately. I know that’s partly me. Work’s been mad, and I get home and I’ve got nothing left, and that’s not fair on you.’
‘It’s not just you,’ I say, because it isn’t, and because the guilt of letting him take the blame for something that is mostly my fault turns my stomach.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Whatever it is. Let’s just keep doing this, yeah?’
I nod. I squeeze his hand. And I don’t trust myself to say anything else, because if he asked me to explain where I’ve been for the past month, I wouldn’t know how to answer without lying or telling the truth, and both of those feel equally dangerous right now.
But he doesn’t ask. He just finishes his wine and tells me about a case at work that’s driving him mad, a property dispute where both sides are lying through their teeth. I listen properly, ask questions, and it feels like the easiest thing in the world.
We go to bed at the same time. We lie facing each other in the dark, and he tucks my hair behind my ear. I lean forward and kiss him, and he kisses me back, and for a while there’s nothing in my head except the warmth of his hands and the weight of him and the quiet of the house around us.
I can do this. I can be here.
I can keep my family together.
By Friday, things are better still. We’ve fallen into a rhythm that I’d forgotten we were capable of – small touches, actual conversations, Alex texting me during the day, me replying straight away instead of leaving it hours.
Olivia hasn’t said anything, but she’s come downstairs twice without being asked and sat in the living room with us while we watched television, her feet tucked under a cushion.
I know she can feel the difference even if she’d never admit it.
The three of us, together, in the same room, not performing for each other. Just existing.
I take her to buy new PE trainers after school, then suggest we go back to our favourite café on the high street for a hot chocolate. The Christmas lights are up along the high street already, strung between the street lights, not yet switched on.
‘Can I get cream this time?’
‘You can get whatever you want.’
She narrows her eyes. ‘What’s the catch?’
‘No catch.’
‘You’re being weird lately,’ she says. ‘Like, nice weird. But still weird.’
‘I’m always nice.’
‘Debatable.’
But she links her arm through mine for about three seconds as we cross the road, which in thirteen-year-old terms is practically a declaration of love. I store the moment away like a photograph.
Olivia takes her hot chocolate to a seat by the window and pulls out her phone. I stand at the counter waiting for change, and that’s when I see a familiar face through the glass.
Lisa Drewett.
She’s coming out of the chemist across the street with a paper bag in one hand, her car keys in the other, and she looks exactly the way I remember her but slightly weathered, the way we all are now – practical coat, sensible haircut, tired around the eyes.
She turns her head and sees me through the café window at almost the same moment I see her, and there’s a flicker of something across her face – surprise, or maybe something closer to panic – before she rearranges it into a smile and pushes open the door.
‘Kim! God, I haven’t seen you in ages.’
My stomach drops. Not because of Lisa herself, but because of what she represents. The past. Ross. The version of myself I’ve spent the best part of a week trying to pack into a box and shove under the bed.
‘Lisa, hi.’ I manage a smile. ‘How are you?’
‘Good, yeah. Busy. You know how it is.’ She glances across at the window seat. ‘God, is that Olivia? She’s so grown-up.’
‘She’d be thrilled to hear you say that.’
Lisa laughs, but there’s something behind it – a tightness, a hesitation, the way someone acts when they’ve got words queued up and they’re trying to find the right gap to push them through.
‘She looks like you,’ she says.
‘Poor kid.’
‘Oh, shut up.’ She shifts her weight. Glances at the counter, at the door, at her keys. ‘Listen. Are you in a rush?’
‘Not really. We were just heading back.’
‘Could I buy you a coffee? There’s something that’s come up lately, and we need to talk.’
The words are light enough. Friendly, even. But my pulse picks up immediately because I know Lisa, or I knew her, and she was never the sort of person who mentally rehearsed conversations in advance. She was a blurt-it-out, say-it-and-regret-it, deal-with-the-fallout-later kind of person.
There is only one thing Lisa Drewett and I have in common that would need rehearsing.
‘Sure,’ I say. My voice comes out steady, which is a small miracle. ‘Olivia, do you mind waiting in the car for a few minutes?’
Olivia looks up. ‘How many minutes?’
‘Ten. Fifteen at the most.’
She sighs like I’ve asked her to carry the car home on her back. ‘Can I have the keys?’
I hand them over, and she wanders off with her hot chocolate.
I watch her go and think about how easy it was.
Five days of pretending the past didn’t exist, of being a good wife – a present mother, and a person with a clean, simple life – and how all it took was bumping into one person on the high street to feel the whole thing start to slide.
Lisa orders two flat whites without asking what I want, which is fine because I couldn’t focus on a menu right now if my life depended on it.
We sit at a table near the back. The café is warm and crowded, spoons clinking against mugs, the coffee machine grinding away behind the counter.
I’m glad of the noise because it means nobody else is going to hear this conversation, whatever it turns out to be.
Lisa wraps both hands around her mug. She looks at me, and I can see her deciding where to begin, the way you watch someone standing at the edge of a swimming pool trying to convince themselves to jump.
‘This is going to sound strange,’ she says.
‘All right.’
‘And I don’t want you to think I’m stirring things up, because I’m not. I swear I’m not. I just—’ She stops. Takes a breath. Presses her lips together. ‘I think you need to hear this, and I’d rather it was me than someone else.’
My mouth goes dry. I take a sip of coffee that I can barely taste and set the mug down and wait, because there’s nothing I can say to that.
No way to prepare for whatever is about to come out of her mouth.
I just sit there with my hands flat on the table, my heart hammering against my ribs, and I think about Alex squeezing my hand across the dinner table two nights ago, Olivia rolling her eyes at us, the cover design on my desk, and the text that said Hope today’s a good one x.
All the small things I’ve been building back up brick by brick over five careful, hopeful, borrowed days.
Lisa opens her mouth.
And I know, before she says a single word, that whatever she tells me is going to knock every one of them down.