Chapter 2
Nika
When I woke up, Finley had already left for work.
I stared at the empty side of the bed for a moment, then at the ceiling. Gone was the soft kiss before he left—that small, stupid thing I hadn’t realised I’d been missing until it stopped happening. The pang of sadness hit before I could redirect my thoughts.
I wasn’t even sure what I was sad about. What we used to be, maybe. What I’d thought we were heading toward. Not what we actually were now.
Roommates with occasional missionary sex.
I reached for my phone.
The morning light was grey and thin through the curtains, the kind that made everything feel slightly unresolved. I pulled the duvet up to my chin and opened my photo library, scrolling back through months of my own life like a stranger flicking through someone else’s album.
Trees. Flowers. A pigeon on a wall. Buildings. A cat sitting on a bin bag looking absolutely disgusted with the world. More flowers. A dog I’d photographed through a café window because it was wearing a tiny raincoat.
Human photos were few and far between.
I kept scrolling.
The months peeled back and I hit last summer—the pictures still bright with actual sunlight, actual colour. Finley and I at a barbecue, both squinting into the camera. Me laughing at something I couldn’t remember anymore. I looked happy. I thought I had been.
That was around the time he started making suggestions.
Subtly, at first. Then less so.
Wear something a bit sexier when we go out. Those shoes are a bit frumpy, aren’t they? You have nice eyes—have you ever thought about contacts?
Who wanted to poke their fingertip into their own eyeball every morning? Not me. I’d tried once in my teens and nearly had a breakdown in a Boots changing room.
But I’d tried. Because that’s what I did. Someone expressed disappointment in me and I folded myself smaller to fix it, stretched myself thinner to accommodate it.
He’d made me feel inadequate and I’d responded by trying harder.
Same as always.
I put the phone down on the duvet and looked back up at the ceiling.
At least it was Friday.
I checked the time, decided I had enough of a window before my late start, and called my mum.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Nika, how are you, sweetie?”
Something in my chest loosened at the sound of her voice. I smiled before I’d even opened my mouth.
“Hi, Mum. I’ve got a late start, thought I’d give you a call.”
“At least I have one daughter who cares,” she said, with the grumble she reserved for Sara.
“I did the same thing when I was her age.”
“You were much more sensible.”
I winced. Sensible. The word landed like a small, blunt thing. It wasn’t meant unkindly—it never was with her—but it made me sound incredibly boring. A beige sort of person. Reliable. Functional. Easy to overlook.
There it was again.
I let her talk, and she talked well—Dad was planning a trip, something about flights he’d found at an obscene discount, and I made the right noises until a number snagged my attention.
“Sorry, Mum—how much did you say the flights were?”
“Twenty-nine pounds each.”
“That’s less than a train ticket,” I said. “That costs more to get to Manchester.”
“You know what these cheap airlines are like. They get you on the extras. Seat allocation, extra baggage. The food and beverages.”
“Still, Mum. Twenty-nine pounds to Spain.”
“Your dad’s an expert,” she chuckled.
I grinned properly for the first time all morning. My dad was so tight I genuinely wasn’t sure how he managed to go to the toilet. Weekly event at best.
But something about the word holiday had lodged itself quietly in my thoughts and wasn’t moving.
A change of scenery. Sun. Somewhere that wasn’t this flat, this ceiling, this grey Friday light.
Maybe that was what we needed—Finley and I. A reset. Somewhere new, without the routine pressing down on everything. It might bring back something. A flicker of whatever used to be there.
Maybe.
It was Friday.
Cheap plonk Friday.
I could suggest it to him tonight.
??
??
??
The inhaler was in my mouth before I’d fully registered reaching for it. I pressed down and sucked the substance deep into my lungs, holding it there while the city moved around me.
Walking was good for my asthma. The pollution was not. London gave with one hand and took with the other.
I stood on the pavement outside Kilcullen Tech and watched the stream of people push past—heads down, coffees up, earphones in. Everyone performing the same ritual of getting somewhere they probably didn’t want to be.
Everything in my life felt like a closed loop.
I shoved the inhaler back into my bag.
Why was I being so morbid?
Because you know you deserve better. What happened to all your dreams?
I hate you, brain.
Go inside and work your brain-dead job. Kill me some more, bitch.
I chuckled. A woman in a blazer gave me a look as she passed.
I didn’t stop smiling.
The revolving door spat me into the lobby—all glass and steel and the kind of aggressively clean air that only existed in buildings where the rent was eye-watering. The soft click of heels on polished floors. The security desk where Marcus was already on the phone and gave me a nod as I passed.
I skipped the stairs. The walk from the Tube had already done its damage and I wasn’t performing wellness for anyone. I took the lift to the sixth floor, stood in the mirrored box of it, and avoided my own eyes.
The double wooden doors to our section were straight ahead. I swiped my card. The lock clicked.
The doors opened onto the familiar low roar of the office—keyboards, murmured calls, someone’s Teams notification going off every forty seconds like a metronome of mild suffering.
Inside, the morning was already in full swing.
Heads bent over screens. A project lead at the whiteboard talking through a delivery timeline to a small cluster of people who were nodding with the focused energy of people being watched by someone senior.
Presentations happening in the glass-walled rooms along the far wall, slides reflected faintly in the windows.
Everyone busy. Everyone going somewhere.
I reached our bank of desks.
Andy was the only one there, laptop open, not looking up.
“Morning,” I said, setting my bag down.
“Morning.” He still didn’t look up. “You wouldn’t mind grabbing me a coffee when you get yours, would you?”
I stood there for a beat.
And so it began.