Daniel said he would be out between ten and twelve on Saturday. At ten past ten, he opened the door before I could use my key.
“I thought we should talk.”
I stood on the step with two empty bags and the peppermint tin in my coat pocket. Behind me, Mina’s car idled at the curb. She had Kit’s football boots to deliver, a food shop to do and no patience available for Daniel. We had agreed that she would come back in forty minutes.
“You said you wouldn’t be here.”
“I moved a meeting.”
He made it sound like a sacrifice. I looked past him into the hall. My scarf still hung on the banister. The little brass bowl for our keys sat on the table beneath the mirror, with three coins and a receipt in it. There was no sign that this was a house in which something enormous had happened.
“I’m getting my things.”
“I know.”
He stepped aside.
I had slept in the house most nights for the last year. My flat held work and the things we had not yet found places for. Here were my toothbrush, my favorite pan, a pair of trainers beneath the kitchen radiator. The intimacy of those ordinary objects hurt more than I had expected.
On the sitting-room shelf, between two books Daniel had bought and never opened, stood the old tailoring manual he’d given me our first Christmas together. I had mentioned it once in a secondhand shop in York, then put it back because the price was ridiculous and I had a tax bill coming. He had gone back for it while I was buying coffee.
I took it down. The spine had loosened with use. Inside the cover, his handwriting slanted across the endpaper: For the next impossible costume. D.
There was a stain on page forty-three from the night we’d tried to make dinner together and failed badly enough to order pizza. I had been explaining a sleeve to him with the book open on the table. He had listened for longer than the subject required, then held out his arm and asked whether that was why his jackets always pulled when he drove.
I had loved him for listening. I could remember the pleasure of it as clearly as I remembered the spilled wine, the burned onions, his laughter when I tried to demonstrate a badly cut armhole with my own blouse.
“I wondered whether you’d want that,” he said behind me.
I closed the book.
“Yes.”
He leaned against the doorframe. “You used to tell me about all of it. Every job.”
“I still tried.”
He looked down.
There had been a gradual change, too ordinary to mark on a calendar. A story interrupted because his phone rang. A good piece of work reduced to whether it had paid on time. I had shortened the explanations until I could give him the practical answer first and sometimes not bother with the rest.
“I liked hearing about it,” he said.
I ran my thumb along the edge of the pages. “I liked telling you.”
For a moment, neither of us had anywhere useful to look. The room held a life that had not been unhappy every day. I could not make it easier to leave by turning every remembered evening into a mistake.
Daniel moved toward me, perhaps because he thought the quiet had become an opening. I put the book into the bag before he reached me.
“I need the box from under the stairs too,” I said.
“The one with the patterns?”
“Yes.”
“I can get it.”
He went into the hall. I stayed beside the shelf for a moment, looking at the space the book had left. Then I picked up the little wooden bird we’d bought at a market because it looked permanently offended. He had named it after a difficult client. I had moved it from the kitchen to the shelf so I could see it when I came in.
I put it back.
I didn’t need every object that had made me happy. I wanted the book because I would use it, because the notes in the margins were mine, because there was work still to do that did not require Daniel to understand it.
When he returned with the box, I took it from him and set it by the front door. The weight of it was familiar. Paper, old fabric samples, a future I had been making long before I knew what it would have to survive.
In the bedroom, the bed was made. There were two pillows on each side, arranged in the way I liked. Daniel had never understood why anybody needed more than one pillow, but he had kept them like that.
I opened the wardrobe and began putting my clothes into a bag.
He stood in the doorway. “I haven’t moved anything.”
“I can see.”
“I wouldn’t.”
I paused with a jumper in my hands, then folded it. The gesture he wanted credit for was so small beside what he had done that I didn’t know how to answer without shouting.
“I know how this looks,” he said.
“I’m not sure you do.”
“It wasn’t planned.”
“You’ve had time to get used to it. I haven’t.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. I had seen him do that over difficult tax returns, parking fines, a conversation with his father. Until this week, the familiarity would have softened me.
“Sophie was going through a bad time.”
I put the jumper in the bag.
“Stop.”
“I’m trying to explain.”
“You’re telling me why she needed you. You haven’t told me why you needed to lie to me.”
Daniel looked toward the window. A neighbor was washing a car in the street, dragging a hose around the front wheel. We could hear water striking metal.
“I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“So you proposed.”
“At the time, I thought—”
He stopped. For once, I didn’t help him finish.
After a while he said, “I thought I could put it right.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. It was the first thing he had said that sounded like an answer, and I hated that it made him briefly recognizable. Daniel believed in orderly corrections. If a figure was wrong, you found where it had gone wrong and worked backward until the columns balanced.
“You were going to marry me while she was pregnant.”
“We didn’t know then.”
I closed my eyes.
He came a step closer. “Claire, I did love you.”
I opened them again. “I know.”
He looked almost relieved, and that made me stand.
“That doesn’t make this better.”
I went into the bathroom for my things. My toothbrush had a little worn patch on the handle where my thumb rested. His stood beside it in the cup. I put mine into the bag and left his there, a small separation that felt absurdly difficult.
When I returned, Daniel was holding the tin I had taken from my pocket and placed on the dresser.
“Don’t open that.”
He put it down at once.
I took out the ring myself. The diamond looked smaller away from my hand. I placed it beside his watch.
He stared at it.
“I wasn’t asking for it back.”
“I know.”
“You could keep it.”
“I don’t want to.”
I waited for him to stop looking at it and look at me. Eventually he did.
“The hotel says they can’t transfer the arrangements without speaking to you,” he said.
There it was. Not the only reason he had stayed home, perhaps, but a reason.
“Then you’ve spoken to them.”
“Your mother thinks—”
“I’m not asking what Mum thinks.”
His face tightened. “We can’t afford to lose all of it.”
“Neither can I.”
“Then surely it makes sense to use what we’ve already paid for.”
I looked at him for a long moment. He had said something very similar about a holiday once, when I was too tired to go and he wanted to make sure the money wasn’t wasted. We had gone. I had spent the first two days in bed with a fever, listening to him tell the hotel staff I was a little under the weather.
“You can discuss your arrangements with the hotel,” I said. “I’m not helping you turn mine into them.”
“You know this isn’t what I wanted.”
“I don’t think you know what you wanted.”
I picked up the first bag. “I need the sewing machine from the spare room.”
He followed me downstairs and lifted it before I could. It was heavy, and I let him carry it. Refusing every useful thing he did would have made leaving take longer, and I was beginning to want the door more than I wanted to make a point.
In the kitchen, I found my pan and three cookbooks. One had a piece of paper marking a recipe I’d planned to try for his birthday. I pulled it out and put it in the bin.
My phone rang. Mina was outside.
Daniel carried the machine to the car. Mina got out, opened the boot and said, “Morning,” in a voice that made it clear the word was a description rather than a wish.
I went back once for the scarf on the banister. Then I took his key off my ring and set it in the brass bowl.
He stood in the hall while I did it.
“Can we talk again when things are less raw?”
I looked at the staircase, the room beyond him, the place beside the radiator where my trainers had been.
“About practical things. If we need to.”
“I don’t want you to think none of it mattered.”
That caught me. I wished it hadn’t. There were years in the house that had been good, and I was not ready to hand them all over to his new story of how things had become inevitable.
“Then don’t make me explain why it hurts.”
I left before he could answer.
Mina drove with both hands on the wheel. For the first few streets she said nothing. Then she glanced at me.
“I have a very boring story about Kit’s football coach, if that would help.”
“Please.”
She told it in great detail. It involved cones, a group message and a misunderstanding about biscuits. I listened as though it were the most important thing I had ever heard.
By the time we reached my flat, I could carry my bags without shaking.
I spent the afternoon putting things away. Not all of them. Some remained in the bags because there was only so much cupboard space and only so much sorting I could bear. At five, I gave up and went to the theater.
There was no reason to work on Saturday evening. The coat could wait until Monday. I knew that, and took it out anyway.
The pearl buttons changed it exactly as I’d hoped. I pinned the new collar in place, stood back and felt the first uncomplicated satisfaction of the day.
“That’s much less blue.”
Nick stood in the doorway with two scripts under his arm.
“It’s always been green.”
“I know. I was there for the hearing.”
He came in far enough to see the coat properly. “It looks different.”
“It looks finished.”
He nodded, studying it rather than searching for a compliment. I found I liked that.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“Forgot the script with all the notes in it. Spent an hour learning from the clean one before I realized I was carefully repeating things Helen had told me not to do.”
“Efficient.”
“I try.”
He glanced at my worktable. There was a sandwich on it that I had made at lunchtime and failed to eat.
“Have you had dinner?”
“That’s dinner.”
“It’s looking discouraged.”
“It contains cheese. It can survive disappointment.”
He laughed, then stopped looking at the sandwich. “I’m going to make tea. Do you want some?”
“Yes.”
While he was gone, I finished the first side of the collar. My hand was steady now. I had expected being seen by someone to make me feel worse; instead, the fact that he was making tea in the next room seemed to settle the air.
He came back with two mugs and a packet of ginger biscuits from a cupboard I had thought contained only dead batteries.
“Rhys’s emergency supply,” he said.
“He’ll know.”
“I’ll replace them.”
“He counts.”
Nick looked at the packet. “Then we’d better enjoy this.”
We ate the biscuits sitting on opposite sides of the cutting table. I told him about the football-coach story, badly. He laughed at the wrong part and asked a question Mina would have enjoyed answering.
“I got my things today,” I said.
The sentence came out before I had decided to say it.
Nick set down his mug. “From Daniel’s?”
I nodded.
“Was he there?”
“Yes.”
Nick looked at the table for a moment. There was a pin stuck into the felt between us. He moved it into the cushion with the others.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not especially.”
“All right.”
I looked at him. “I gave him the ring.”
His eyes moved to my hand. He didn’t reach for it.
“I thought I’d feel better,” I said. “Or worse. Something definite.”
“And?”
“I felt as though I’d forgotten to do a very important thing. Then I realized the important thing was usually making sure he was all right.”
Nick leaned back in the chair. His face was difficult to read.
“You don’t have to look as if you’re choosing a careful answer,” I said.
“I was.”
“I know.”
He smiled a little. “I’m not very good at this.”
“Neither am I.”
That helped more than whatever careful thing he might have said.
We finished the tea. He asked about a drawing pinned to the wall, a coat I had designed for a production that never found funding. I told him about it, and about the ridiculous argument I’d had with a producer who wanted it to look expensive but also as if it had been found in a ditch.
“Could it be an expensive ditch?” Nick asked.
I laughed, and he looked so pleased that I laughed again.
Then I noticed how close he had come to see the drawing. He stood beside my chair, one hand resting on its back. I could have leaned a little and touched his wrist with my cheek.
I looked up at him.
The amusement left his face slowly. He didn’t move away. I could hear the old radiator ticking, though the heating had been off for hours.
“Claire,” he said.
It was only my name. No explanation attached to it.
I stood. We were close enough now that I could see the light caught in his eyes. I had spent days feeling looked at, assessed, worried over. This was different, and my body knew it before I found any words for it.
I put a hand against his shirt.
He waited until I came closer. Then his hand left the chair and settled at my waist, warm and light enough that I could have stepped away.
I didn’t.
The first kiss was brief. I felt his breath against my cheek afterward, and then I was the one who reached for him again.
There was nothing practiced about the small, surprised sound he made. It went through me with such force that I forgot the theater, the bags in my flat, the empty place on my hand. For a few seconds I was only a woman kissing a man she wanted.
When we moved apart, my fingers were still caught in his shirt.
“Oh,” I said.
He smiled, not quite steadily. “Another professional assessment?”
I laughed into his shoulder. It was an absurd place to find myself laughing, and I wanted to stay there.
That was what frightened me.
I loosened my hand and stepped back.
Nick let his arm fall. Neither of us spoke while I picked up my mug, then put it down because it was empty and I had no use for it.
“I should go home.”
He nodded. His mouth was still a little flushed.
“Yes. All right.”
I wanted him to say something that would make the moment simple. I also knew I would resent him if he tried.
At the door, I turned back. “I’m not sorry.”
His expression changed, relief showing before he could hide it.
“Neither am I.”
I walked home with my coat open to the cool air. Halfway up the hill, I touched my mouth and looked around to make sure nobody had seen me do it.