Chapter 7 The Woman—24 Months Ago
The young woman is waiting for Simon outside the cinema.
She is early. She doesn’t come to this side of London often, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to find the right entrance or level or cinema inside the overwhelmingly vast shopping complex; but here she is, and she is early.
The smell of warm popcorn floats to her on an air-conditioned breeze. She wonders if she should go in, get snacks. But perhaps he’ll want to do that together.
She imagines them nestled close in the darkness, his thigh warm against hers, and she decides she will wait for him. They can choose together.
It’s funny—after her twenties flashed before her eyes, a parade of university friends wedding-down, buying houses, and decorating nurseries—she started to think that love might just be a trick you played on yourself, and each other, a long con.
But after meeting Simon a month ago, she felt it almost immediately.
That feeling you were supposed to feel: the one they wrote songs about, the one that movies crescendo up to, the feeling everyone mentioned in all those handwritten wedding vows she sat through.
The feeling was simply this: she desperately wanted, no, needed, to be close to him, indefinitely. Forever. That was what it was, her feeling of love. When she wasn’t close to him, she thought about next being close to him—when that might be, how she might engineer getting closer still.
And he felt the same.
The closeness required touch, as much contact as possible, really—a biological pull so strong it was impossible to argue with. The achingly primitive biological imperative of it did not pass her by, but the point stood: love was real. And she had found it, finally, at thirty-two.
She reassured herself that finding a partner on an app wasn’t embarrassing anymore. After all, she’d attended two weddings in the last three years where the couples had met that exact way.
Sure, it meant that she had to have a few awkward drinks and coffees with some instant noes before she’d chanced upon Simon, but if anything, that had thrown him into relief.
How-oh-how had she found Simon?
He was better in real life than his pictures, genuinely handsome, not just okay from certain angles. She actually giggled when she first saw him through the coffee shop window.
And it wasn’t only his looks. They hit it off immediately. He had that easy, friend’s-older-brother way about him—sexy but safe, approachable.
Conversation came easily, and the way he looked at her—and listened to her, genuinely interested in the things she was saying, eager to hear more, everything about her: her friends, her past, her hopes and dreams—made her suddenly understand marriage, and kids, and the whole magnetic, cyclical sweep of it all.
Her phone begins to vibrate in her coat pocket, distracting her from her reverie, a jolt of fear running through her at the idea that it might be him calling to cancel. That it might all be over.
He could easily have met someone else on the app, he could have come to his senses and realized that she is not really in his league.
She is attractive enough—she knows that.
It is just everything else in her life that is the problem.
She doesn’t have a career like he does, just an office job; she doesn’t have a house of her own, like he does; she just isn’t where she should be at thirty-two.
In short, she just thinks she doesn’t quite seem like the kind of woman someone like Simon might be with. On paper.
Her mother has a tendency to reference where she herself was in her thirties versus where her daughter now finds herself. It is meant to encourage her, she guesses, to chivvy her on, but it feels bad all the same because she hasn’t yet done the things a lot of other people have.
Her phone vibrates on, in long, drawn-out writhes, in her pocket. She fishes it out, looks at the screen. It is her mother. She swipes the call away, and her phone stops vibrating. She’ll call her back later, though she still has absolutely no intention of telling her mother about Simon.
Her mother will find a way to take the sparkle from it—she always does, though she would argue that this is never her intention.
So the young woman will keep Simon secret, for as long as she can. She has found something of her own, something special, magical, even, and she doesn’t want to show her mother what she has found.
Simon understands. He isn’t close with his family anymore, either.
She checks the time. One minute to seven. He’ll be here soon.
The mall around her hums with activity, young people, families out, late-night shopping. The lights of the stores are warm and inviting, the scent of freshly popped corn continues to waft out of the multiplex and the world feels full to bursting with possibility.
She feels in the world in a way she hasn’t for a long time.
Now that she has met Simon, she sees a path slowly, tentatively opening up ahead of her, a future like everyone else’s: a beautiful house, a wedding, a nursery, a wonderful and full life yet unlived.
She might just get to do it all.
Thirty-two is not old, she tells herself. It’s never too late to start your life.
She feels his presence before she sees him, her eyes scanning the sea of bodies and alighting on him: his tall, strong frame, that smile that crinkles his eyes whenever he looks at her, like he’s coming home to her.
A smile rises up from deep within her, and with it a leap of yearning in her chest as happiness, like a landslide, engulfs her.
—
She relives this moment over and over in her mind, the freedom of it, the possibility, the fact she could have so easily just walked away from outside that cinema, jumped on an escalator, and disappeared into the weaving shopping-complex crowds.
He didn’t even know her address back then. She could have escaped so easily that day and never looked back.
She will play and replay waiting for him outside the cinema and all the moments that tumbled after it and wonder: Would things have been different if she had just answered her mother’s call, if she had told anyone about this whirlwind romance?
Would it have kept her from ending up here, in this room, or might it have ended up worse?
She watches the window from her thin mattress bed, attentive, ready.
When the fluffy gray cat first arrived, she panicked, unable to believe her luck.
She could barely think straight, so desperate not to mess up this one chance.
She fed him, scratched her message into the red leather of his collar, and let him go.
Someone is going to see it, she promised herself. They have to.
Someone will read her cry for help.
Someone will come looking.
The million-dollar question, though, is whether or not the very little she was able to scrawl was enough, and whether the cat will ever come back.