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Chapter 113-What She Is Afraid Of
publish date:
2026-07-20 17:36:59
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Staying with him Chapter 113-What She Is Afraid Of
She named it on a Wednesday evening in June whenthe light was going long and warm through the flat'skitchen window and she was in the flat's secondtrimester and she was eight weeks pregnant and shehad been carrying the fear for five weeks and haddecided, the way she decided things that had beenheld long enough, that tonight was the night to put itdown.She had been naming fears for five years. She wasgood at it now, the way she was good at the thingsshe had done consistently for five years, the way yougot good at anything when you did it consistently andwith full attention. She had named the fear of the city.The fear of the closed door. The fear at four in themorning before the wedding. She had named the fearto her supervisor and to Priya and to him, in thekitchen and in cars and in the dark at three in themorning when it arrived without warning. She wasgood at naming fears.This one she had been holding back from namingbecause it was the specific one, the Olivia fea
Staying with him CHAPTER 112- Her Clients
The professional question arrived on a Tuesday inMarch, between her second and third client, in thesame bathroom with the frosted window where shehad taken the test six weeks before.She was standing at the sink washing her hands andshe caught her face in the mirror and she thought:when do I tell them.She had not been thinking about it consciously. Shehad been managing it, in the old sense of the word,which was the temporary sense, the sense she hadlearned to distinguish from the permanent sealing ofa thing. She had been managing it because it was notyet visible and because the professional question ofdisclosure was a real question with nostraightforward answer and she needed the space tothink about it before she said anything, and becausethinking about it required her to consider each clientindividually rather than making a blanket decision, andthe individual considering of seventeen clients was itsown kind of work that she had been doing below thesurface of everyt
Staying with him CHAPTER 111- Marcus
She went on a Thursday morning, which was whenshe always went to the academy on purpose ratherthan by accident, and she went early, before thesessions began, because she wanted Marcus beforethe day had any demands on him.She had thought about how to do this for a week. Notanxiously, not with the architecture of preparation shehad once built around important conversations, but inthe particular way she thought about things thatdeserved the right approach. She had told him aboutthe retirement in a kitchen. She had told him about thewedding over tea. She had told him about Damien'shealth concerns in a car park. But this was differentfrom all of those. This was not news about Damienprimarily. This was news about her. News that camefrom the part of her life that was hers and that shehad, over five years, chosen to share with Marcus inthe specific limited way that two people shared thingswhen one of them was the coach and the other wasthe person the coach had been watching
Staying with him CHAPTER 110-The Telling Order
She told Priya first, which was the only possible order.She called on the Wednesday morning before her firstsession, which meant she was calling at eight fifteenfrom the tube, one hand on the overhead bar and thephone against her ear, the train doing what trains did,and Priya answered on the second ring with the toneshe used when she already knew something hadhappened and was checking the register of it.What has happened, Priya said.I am pregnant, Olivia said.A silence.The specific Priya silence of genuine surprise, whichwas different from her processing silence and her I-already-knew silence, both of which Olivia hadbecome expert at identifying over twelve years. Thiswas the real one, the half-second before thepersonality caught up with the news and thepersonality reasserted itself over the receiving.Olivia, Priya said.Yes.You are. Pregnant.I am.On purpose, Priya said. Not to be intrusive. I am tryingto establish the nature of the thing.Not in the specific sen
Staying with him CHAPTER 109-How She Told Him
She did not build up to it.She had thought, on the tube, that she might need to.That she would sit him down and there would besome sort of approach to the thing, some preparationof the room for the sentence, the preamble, the wayshe had always built architecture around theimportant statements. She had spent years not doingthat, years of learning to say the important thing whenit was ready rather than when the architecture aroundit was complete. She did not do it now. She camethrough the door and he looked at her and thearchitecture was entirely unnecessary.I am pregnant, she said.He went still.Not the surprise-still, though surprise was part of it.The other kind of still, the kind she had come to knowas his first and truest response to something thatrequired the full weight of his attention beforeanything else could happen. She had seen this still inkitchens and in cars and in a registry office in the rain.The stillness of a man receiving something true. Thestillnes
Staying with him CHAPTER 108- The Tuesday
She found out between her second and third client ona Tuesday in February.She had suspected on Sunday. She had known onMonday in the specific way of knowing something youhave not yet confirmed, that you are carrying at arm'slength to maintain the fiction of uncertainty whileknowing the uncertainty is not real. She had boughtthe test at the pharmacy near the practice on Tuesdaymorning, before her first session, picking it up withoutceremony, without the examining of the moment orthe building of it into something more than what itwas, which was a woman who needed to know a thingand was buying the equipment for knowing it.She put the test in her bag and she went to her firstsession and she was good in it, fully present, the workdoing what the work did when she was doing it well.She went to her second session and was equally goodin it. Between the second and the third session therewere twenty minutes.She went to the bathroom at the end of the corridor.The bathroom had
Staying with him CHAPTER 7: The Morning After
She woke up and knew exactly where she was. No foggy confusion, no blinking at strange walls. Just the solid weight of Damien’s arm across her waist, the unfamiliar slant of light through his curtains, and that smell—his smell—that she’d stopped pretending she didn’t like days ago.She stayed still
Staying with him Chapter 3: Flooded
started with a sound.A low, persistent dripping that worked its way into Olivia’s sleep sometime around 3am and sat there until she couldn’t ignore it anymore. She opened her eyes to the dark ceiling, listened, and felt the specific dread of someone who already knows something is wrong before the
Staying with him Chapter 2: The View
Three weeks.That’s how long Olivia lasted before she stopped filing noise complaints and accepted that Damien Cole was simply a fact of her life now — like traffic, or difficult clients, or the radiator that clicked every night at 2am. Unavoidable. Irritating. Something to be managed.She managed
Staying with him Chapter 1: The Neighbor from Hell
Olivia had a system.Not in an obsessive way — or at least that’s what she told herself. It was just that life ran smoother when things were predictable. Coffee at seven, two cups, no sugar. Breakfast with something quiet playing in the background — Sade, maybe, or just the sound of the city waking
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