Chapter 16 The Woman—23 Months Ago
She likes the slow inexorability of their relationship; everything about it feels right, steady, grounded. It’s hardly too impulsive, by any stretch of the imagination.
So that when he finally says the words she has been waiting to hear, she’ll know in her heart it is real, and isn’t merely a passing moment, or sudden flare of emotion.
She has wanted to say it to him before now, but has been careful not to be the one to say it first, just in case.
This evening, he met her outside work, down the road, in fact, not wanting to ambush her while with her work friends. She appreciated the gesture.
She’s told her friends she is seeing someone, but only in passing, something in her wanting to keep him solely for herself, as if to prevent contamination.
She still hasn’t told her mother. There no longer seems a point. She can already imagine all the things her mother would say about the relationship anyway, all the subtle barbs, barbs she would deny were even barbs.
She knows her own mother does not see her as the shining trophy she wanted as a daughter.
Simon walked her to the Tube, and told her to trust him; he was taking her somewhere special. They changed lines twice, and for the first time since being a kid, she didn’t even look at the Tube map. She let him take control.
He gestured for them to get off at Hyde Park, where he led her deep into an open grassy space. Night had fallen, the Victorian park lights glowing like props in Mary Poppins. And there on the grass, in the middle of Hyde Park, he’d laid out a wool blanket and emptied his backpack: a picnic.
Looking at the little spread, she felt treasured. By the ceremony, by his effort.
Wrapped in his arms, she sipped Champagne and ate the strawberries and the chocolates he’d bought her in the cooling evening air, his body warm against hers. And that is when he said it.
“I need you to know that I love you.”
She wanted to say it straight back, her heart bursting, hot with it inside her. But instead, she held it a little longer and said with calm inevitability, “I feel the same way.”
She was glad it came out like that. He squeezed her tight, the tickle of his warm breath on her ear.
“I would do anything for you. Do you know that?” he told her. “To keep you close, keep you safe.”
She’d smiled. She didn’t know yet what that might mean. She turned to him, kissed his nose playfully.
“Have you ever said that before?” she asked.
She caught the flicker in his eyes and berated herself for the stupid question, her mother’s voice whispering through her thoughts.
But Simon smiled. “I said it once,” he answered, “but I was young, you know? We both were. I thought I knew what love was back then, but obviously I didn’t. This is it.”
The words burst open, warm and comforting in her chest.
After that night, he stayed over at hers almost every night.
He had a house in North London, she knew, but she had yet to see it.
Sometimes when her mother’s voice was particularly noisy in her head, she would almost convince herself that Simon already had a wife in that house, kids even, and that was why he never invited her back to his.
After all, he had everything—this handsome, successful, career-driven man, with a home and that easy approachable way he had about him—it would almost make sense that she would only be a sideline to his real life.
Her with her middle-management job, her rental flat, her work friends, and her thirtieth birthday already a couple of years behind her.
It would be another four months before she sees inside his house and finds no second life. And she will be so impressed with his world, for a while. And for another six months, after that, they will be so happy, the stage seemingly set for their perfect future together.
It will be a dream, until it isn’t.
Until she wishes, more than anything, that she had told just one person the name of the man she had been seeing, that she had told one person where she was going, where he lived, or about the fact that sometimes her wonderful, handsome, funny, clever, incredibly successful boyfriend woke in the middle of the night screaming.