CHAPTER TEN
They emerged from the corridor together.
Kate had wiped her face with the towel from the en suite, fixed her hair as best she could, pulled the black dress back on.
She looked presentable. Almost. If you didn’t look too closely at the flush still creeping up her neck, or the way she walked—slower than before, more carefully, as though her body were something she was carrying rather than wearing.
The party had thinned. A few people had left. The music was lower now, the lights dimmer. Someone had opened wine. The atmosphere had shifted in the way these things apparently did—softer, looser, the social performance winding down.
Jen was on the sofa, deep in conversation with the woman from Cardiff. She caught Kate’s eye and waved. Kate waved back. A normal wave. The kind you give someone you’ve been discussing slug pellets with, not someone who was thirty feet away while two men—
Kate stopped the thought. Smiled.
The cyclist was in the kitchen, washing glasses. Lisa was leaning against the counter beside him, laughing at something. She looked up when Kate and Daniel passed.
“Leaving already?”
“Long drive,” Daniel said.
“Of course. Lovely to have you both.” Lisa squeezed Kate’s arm. “Come again. Any time.”
Kate thanked her. Meant it.
They found their coats. Shoes. The ordinary ritual of leaving a party—thank you, lovely evening, yes, we must, safe drive.
Kate performed it on autopilot, the same way she’d performed a hundred departures from faculty dinners and neighbourhood barbecues.
Except that her knickers were damp, and her jaw ached, and there were bruises forming on her hips where Jay’s fingers had gripped her.
The front door closed behind them. The street was quiet. Cold air, wet pavement, the orange glow of streetlights. A cat watching them from a wall.
Daniel took her hand. They walked to the car.
The drive home was quiet. Not the tense quiet of the drive out—something else. A shared silence, comfortable, the kind that comes from having been through something together and not needing to narrate it.
Kate leaned her head against the window. Watched the motorway lights slide past. Her body hummed—not with arousal, not anymore, but with something deeper. A settling. Like a house after a storm, everything still standing but rearranged.
Daniel drove the way he always drove. One hand on the wheel. Steady.
They got home just after midnight. The house was dark. Sophie was staying at a friend’s. Oliver at Daniel’s mother’s.
Daniel unlocked the door. Kate stepped inside. The hallway. The coat hooks. Oliver’s rugby boots by the radiator. Sophie’s A-level textbooks stacked on the bottom stair.
Their life. Still here. Still intact.
Daniel filled the kettle. Kate sat at the kitchen table and watched him do it, the same movements he’d made ten thousand times. Mugs. Teabags. Milk from the fridge. The quiet choreography of a marriage.
He set her mug in front of her. Sat across from her.
They drank their tea.
The kitchen clock ticked. The fridge hummed. Outside, a fox screamed somewhere in the dark—that awful sound that always made Sophie jump.
“I can still taste them,” Kate said.
Daniel looked at her over his mug.
“Both of them,” she said. “And I can feel”—she shifted in her chair—“everything.”
Daniel set his mug down. His face was hard to read in the dim kitchen light. But his eyes were bright. “Good,” he said.
They went upstairs. Brushed their teeth side by side, the way they always did.
Kate caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror—the same face from the university toilet, from the hotel in Bristol, from every mirror she’d looked into over the past month.
The same face. But the woman behind it had rearranged herself so thoroughly that Kate sometimes wondered how no one else could see it.
Daniel was already in bed when she came out. She undressed—the black dress over a chair, no ceremony now—and climbed in beside him.
The same bed. The same pillows. The same duvet they’d bought from John Lewis three years ago because Kate had insisted on the higher thread count. The room where he’d said “two men” in the dark, and she’d stared at the ceiling and felt the world tilt.
Kate lay on her side. Daniel on his back. Close enough to touch but not touching. The way they’d lain that night.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
Daniel was quiet for a moment. The house settled around them. A pipe ticking. The wind against the window.
“I’m thinking,” he said, “that I married the right woman.”
Kate smiled. In the dark, where he couldn’t see it. Or maybe he could. After twenty years, he probably knew when she was smiling.
She reached for his hand. Found it. Held it.
“What’s next?” she asked.
Daniel turned his head on the pillow. She could feel him looking at her, even in the dark.
“Whatever we want,” he said.
Kate closed her eyes. Her body was tired, marked, satisfied. Her mind was quiet. Not the vacancy of the bedroom in Bristol—something different. A stillness that came from knowing, finally, exactly who she was.
Kate Morrison. Senior lecturer. Wife. Mother. Slut. All of it, at once, without contradiction.
She fell asleep holding her husband’s hand.
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