Chapter 5
Chapter Five
I shouldn’t be here.
The restaurant is small and busy, tucked down a side street in the centre of Bristol.
I’ve never been before, which is partly why I chose it.
Little chance of bumping into someone I know from Keynsham.
No chance of someone from Olivia’s school spotting me through the window and mentioning it at parents’ evening.
I picked somewhere I’d never have to come back to, as if that makes it better.
It doesn’t.
Ross is already at the table when I arrive.
I see him through the glass before I go in, sitting near the back, reading the menu, a glass of red wine in front of him that it seems he hasn’t touched.
He’s wearing a dark jumper with the sleeves pushed up and his hair is damp at the temples, like he walked here in the rain, and for a second I just stand on the pavement and watch him the way I used to watch him across the library when we were fourteen.
My stomach turns over.
I push the door open, and the warmth hits me – garlic, bread, wine, the low hum of conversation and clinking glasses – and I’m halfway across the room before he glances up.
His face changes when he sees me. He doesn’t grin, stand, or make a scene.
His expression just shifts and softens, the edges of his eyes creasing as if he wants to smile but is holding back.
‘Kim,’ he says.
‘Hi.’ I pull out the chair opposite him and sit. My hands are shaking, so I put them in my lap where he can’t see them. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘You’re not late.’
‘I feel late.’ I pick up the menu because it gives me something to focus on that isn’t his face. The words swim. I can’t take in a single thing on it. ‘Have you ordered?’
‘Just the wine. I didn’t know what you’d want.’
‘I don’t know what I want either,’ I say.
We both hear the honesty in those words, and for a moment, neither of us says anything.
A waiter comes over, and I order a glass of white wine without reading the list. Ross orders another red. The waiter disappears, and I’m left sitting there with no menu to hide behind and nowhere to put my eyes except on the man I’ve been thinking about for weeks.
He looks good. I hate that he looks good.
It would be so much easier if he’d changed beyond recognition – if the years had made him someone I could sit across from and feel nothing.
But he hasn’t. He’s leaner than he was at school, and there’s grey at his temples that wasn’t there before.
The lines around his eyes are deeper, but his face is still the same face.
The same mouth. The same way of watching me like he’s trying to read something written very small.
‘You look terrified,’ he says.
‘I’m not terrified.’
‘You’re gripping the edge of the table.’
I check. He’s right. I let go and put my hands flat on the tablecloth. He smiles – that quick, lopsided smile I remember from the library, the one that used to undo me – and heat climbs up the back of my neck.
‘I’m just a bit nervous,’ I say. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Twenty-odd years.’
‘Thanks for doing the maths.’
He laughs, and the sound helps me relax. I pick up my wine when it arrives and take a sip that’s closer to a gulp. The cold sharpness of it steadies me, and I sit back in my chair and appraise him.
‘So,’ I say.
‘So.’
‘This is strange, isn’t it?’
‘Extremely strange,’ he says. ‘But good strange. I think.’
I want to agree, but I don’t, because agreeing feels like crossing a line I’ve already crossed by being here in the first place. So I just nod and drink more wine and ask him what he’s been doing for the last two decades as if it’s a normal question you can answer over bread and olive oil.
He tells me. Bits of it anyway. He moved around after school – London for a while, then up north, then abroad for a few years doing something with conservation that he glosses over as though it’s not interesting, though it obviously is.
He came back to the area about eighteen months ago.
He lives alone. He doesn’t say why, and I don’t ask.
I tell him about the design work, about going freelance, about the book covers.
He asks questions that make me realise he’s actually listening – questions about the process, about the clients, about whether I still draw the way I used to – and I find myself talking more than I’ve talked about my work in months.
Alex never asks about the covers. He sees them on my monitor and says, ‘Looks good,’ and moves on to whatever he actually wants to talk about, which is usually Olivia’s school or the gas bill, or something one of the partners said at work.
I catch myself. I shouldn’t be comparing them.
‘Do you remember Mr Fenton?’ Ross says.
I nearly choke on my wine. ‘Oh, God. Mr Fenton.’
‘And the time he fell asleep during his own lesson and Jake Osborne drew a moustache on the whiteboard behind him.’
‘And he woke up and didn’t notice for twenty minutes, and nobody told him.’
‘Melanie was crying with laughter. Actually crying. Tears running down her face.’
‘She always cried when she laughed. Do you remember at the Christmas concert when—?’
‘When Danny Healey’s voice broke halfway through “Silent Night”?’
‘And Melanie laughed so hard she had to leave the hall.’
We’re both laughing now. Laughter that comes from somewhere deep and makes your ribs ache.
The tension drains out of my shoulders, the knot in my stomach loosens, and for a few minutes it’s just easy.
Sitting here with Ross is easy in a way that almost nothing in my life is easy right now, because he knew me before any of this – before Alex, before Olivia, before the mortgage and the school run and the slow, grinding business of becoming an adult who has forgotten what she actually wants.
He knew me when I was just Kim – three years of me, fourteen to seventeen. The girl in the library with the book and the burning face and the world shrunk to the size of a single room.
The food arrives. I’ve ordered pasta, which I don’t remember choosing, and Ross has something with fish.
We eat and talk, and the conversation moves between past and present – school, teachers, people we both knew, what happened to them, whether the old building is still standing, and then somehow we’re talking about music, and films, and a band I haven’t thought about since I was sixteen, and he pulls out his phone to show me something and our heads are close together over the screen and I can smell him – clean, warm, faintly woody – and my chest tightens.
I sit back.
‘More wine?’ he asks.
‘I shouldn’t.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
I pause. Then I nod, and he catches the waiter’s eye. I tell myself one more glass isn’t going to change anything and that I’m allowed to have a nice evening. Sitting in a restaurant with someone I used to know is not a crime, not even close, not even in the same postcode as a crime.
My phone buzzes in my bag.
I know before I look. My stomach drops, my fingers go cold around the stem of my glass, and the guilt rises through my chest like something physical – hot, thick, pressing against the base of my throat.
I pull out my phone. The screen glows in my lap.
How long are you going to be?
Alex. No kiss, no emoji, just the question sitting there, an accusation I probably deserve. I told him I was going to a work thing – a drinks party for one of the publishers I do covers for, nothing fancy, just a couple of hours. I told him I’d be back by nine. It’s already quarter past.
‘Everything all right?’ Ross says.
I raise my head. He’s watching me as if he’s waiting for me to tell the truth but isn’t going to force it.
‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Just Alex.’
‘Does he know you’re here?’
The question is delivered softly, but it still winds me. I take a breath and shake my head. My face is doing something I can’t control – maybe shame, maybe defiance, or something caught between the two.
‘He thinks I’m at a work party.’
Ross doesn’t react to that. He doesn’t raise an eyebrow or sit back, or give me a side-eye that makes me feel worse than I already do. He just nods once, slowly, and picks up his glass.
‘Do you need to go?’ he says.
Yes. I should pick up my coat, pay for my half, walk out the door, get in the car, and drive home to my husband, my daughter, and the life I chose. I should text Alex back right now – Leaving soon, twenty minutes – and mean it.
But then I look at Ross. At his face across the table, lit warm by the low overhead lights, his eyes steady on mine.
The easy wreckage of the evening is spread between us – crumbs, napkins, laughter still hanging in the air as though it’s something I could reach up and touch.
And I think about going home to the quiet kitchen, and Alex on the sofa with his laptop, and the conversation we’ll have that isn’t really a conversation, just two people exchanging logistics in the same room.
I put the phone back in my bag.
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s fine.’
Ross holds my gaze for a second longer than he needs to. Then he smiles a slow smile that reaches all the way through me and settles in a place I thought I’d shut down years ago – and lifts his glass.
‘All right then,’ he says.
I lift mine. We drink. And the guilt is still there, sitting heavy in the pit of my stomach, but I ignore it. I push it down, smile back, and I stay.
I stay because this is the first time in months that I feel like someone is actually looking at me.
The second glass of wine goes down warm and easy, and by the time we’re talking again I’ve almost forgotten the text, almost forgotten the lie, almost forgotten the woman I’m supposed to be tonight – the one at the work party, drinking Prosecco, making small talk about print runs and cover concepts.
That woman doesn’t exist. She’s a version of me I created so I could sit here instead, across from a boy I once loved, who vanished from my life without warning and came back years later and reminded me of everything I’ve been missing.
Ross tells me about the conservation work.
About living in Portugal for a year, about the heat, the coast, the silence of it.
I listen, watch his mouth move, and think there is a version of my life where I’m sitting here with no ring on my finger, no lie on my phone, and no husband waiting for me in a house a few miles away.
But that isn’t the version I got.
‘I should go,’ I say eventually, though I don’t sound like I mean it. ‘I really should.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s been…’ I trail off, because every word I can think of – lovely, nice, wonderful – sounds ridiculous and paper-thin compared to what it actually was. ‘It’s been really good to see you.’
‘You, too, Kim.’
We split the bill. He helps me into my coat, his hand brushing my shoulder, and the touch is so light and so brief that I almost convince myself I imagined it.
We walk out into the street, and the air hits me – cold, wet, Bristol at night, car headlights on rain-slicked tarmac – and I stand there with my keys in my hand, my bag over my shoulder, and I don’t know how to say goodbye to him.
‘Shall we walk for a bit?’ he says.
I should say no, find my car, text Alex back, and drive home like the faithful wife I’ve always been. Instead, I gaze up at Ross, smile, and say, ‘Why not?’