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Home / Romance / Affair With My Stepfather / Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

All Chapters of Affair With My Stepfather : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

59 Chapters

FORTY ONE

TomorrowHe told her on a Saturday morning.Not with grand ceremony. Not with the weight of a prepared speech. He told her the way the most honest things between them had always arrived — sideways, in the margins of an ordinary moment, when neither of them was braced for it.Linda had gone to the market. The house was quiet. Zara was at the kitchen table with her second coffee and the weekend papers she was not reading. Ethan came downstairs in a grey t-shirt and jeans, barefoot, hair not yet sorted, and he poured himself a coffee and stood at the counter and looked at her.She looked back."Last night," he said."You said tomorrow.""Yes.""It is tomorrow.""It is."She set the paper down. He came to the table and sat across from her and put his coffee between his hands and looked at it for a moment. She waited. She had learned to wait with him. He said things when he was ready and not before and pushing only made the walls go up."I want this to be real," he said. "Not the version o

FORTY TWO

The Weekend AwayIt was Linda's idea.That was the thing that made it the most complicated. Zara had not engineered it and Ethan had not suggested it. Linda had come home from book club on a Thursday evening full of the news that Sarah was throwing a small weekend gathering at her cottage two hours away, a long overdue thing, just a handful of women, starting Friday evening."You should go," Ethan said immediately. He said it warmly, the way he said things he meant."I feel terrible leaving you both.""Don't," Zara said. "Go. You have been saying you needed to spend time with Sarah for weeks."Linda looked between them. The fond look she gave when she was pleased with something. "You two are so easy," she said. "Most husbands would sulk.""Most husbands have never met Sarah," Ethan said.Linda laughed and went to call Sarah and confirm and neither Zara nor Ethan looked at each other across the kitchen.They did not need to.Linda left on Friday at four with a small bag and instruction

FORTY THREE

What Linda SaysIt was a Tuesday afternoon and Linda said it so quietly that Zara almost missed it.They were in the garden. Not working, just sitting. Linda had a cup of tea and Zara had a glass of water and the afternoon was cool and the light was the low golden kind that arrived in October and made everything look considered.They had been talking about the art class and then about Linda's sister and then about nothing in particular, the conversation moving the way it moved between two people who were comfortable with each other and did not need a destination. Zara was watching a bird do something at the far end of the garden. Linda was looking at the roses.And then Linda said, still looking at the roses: "Does Ethan seem distant to you?"Zara turned to look at her mother.Linda's expression was thoughtful. Not distressed. Not suspicious. The expression of a woman turning something over that she had been sitting with for a while and had decided to say out loud."Distant how?" Zara

FORTY FOUR

ComfortLinda came to her room at eleven on a Wednesday night.Three soft knocks. Not Ethan's three knocks. Lighter. The knock of someone who was not certain they should be knocking and was doing it anyway.Zara opened the door.Linda was in her dressing gown with her hair wrapped and her eyes red and dry in the specific way of someone who had been crying and had stopped and was now in the hollow that came after. She looked like her mother in a way that Zara had not seen in years. Before Ethan. Before the happiness. The other version."Mom.""I am sorry," Linda said. "I know it is late.""Don't be sorry. Come in."Linda came in and sat on the edge of the bed the way Zara had sat on the edge of this bed so many times over the past months and Zara sat beside her and waited."I talked to him," Linda said.Zara was very still."Like you said. About what I was feeling. Not about the project, about us." She was looking at her hands in her lap. "He was honest with me. He said he had somethin

FORTY FIVE

The Morning AfterShe came downstairs at seven.Not because she had slept. Because lying in the dark had stopped doing anything useful and the particular quality of the silence in the house had become something she needed to be in rather than above.Linda's door had been closed when she passed it. No sound from inside.Ethan was in the kitchen.Of course he was. He was always in the kitchen in the early hours when things were difficult. She had learned this about him over months of late nights and early mornings. When he could not be still he made coffee and stood at the window and looked at the garden until the thinking sorted itself.He looked up when she came in.His face was the most tired she had seen it. Not the ordinary tired of a long week. The deeper kind. The tired of a man who had done something necessary and was sitting in the aftermath."She came to my room last night," Zara said."I know. I heard your door.""She told me you talked to her.""Yes.""You told her there was

FORTY SIX

Daniel came to Ethan's office on a Monday morning and this time he did not bring a folder.That was how Ethan knew it was not about the foundation report or the drainage spec or anything that could be solved with a revised drawing. He came in and sat down and looked at Ethan across the desk with the direct unhurried look of a man who had spent a weekend deciding something and had arrived at work this morning entirely clear about it."I need to say something," Daniel said."Say it.""I covered for you twice. With Marcus on the waterfront team and once with a client who asked why you seemed distracted on the site walk two weeks ago. I told Marcus you had personal things on. I told the client you were managing a complex scheduling issue." He paused. "I did both of those things because I respect you and because I believed you were handling whatever it was.""Daniel.""I am not finished." He was not unkind about it. Not aggressive. He was simply a man saying something he had decided to say

Forty Seven

He told Linda on a Wednesday evening.Zara was not in the house when it happened. They had agreed on that. She had packed a bag that afternoon, kissed nobody, and taken a cab to her best friend's flat on the other side of the city. She had her phone on and her friend's sofa and a cup of tea she was not drinking and the particular quality of waiting that was not passive, not patient, just the sustained stillness of someone who had made a decision and was now living inside the consequences of it arriving.Her friend did not ask questions. She put on something low on the television and sat beside Zara and was simply present in the way that only very good friends knew how to be.At six o'clock Zara texted Ethan: I am here. Take your time.He replied: Thank you.That was all.She put the phone face down on the cushion beside her and looked at the television and did not see anything on it.She thought about the conversation happening in the house she had grown up in. She did not know the ex

Forty Eight

Linda did not contact Zara.Not that day. Not the day after. Not for two full weeks.The silence was not unexpected. Zara had known it was coming and had told herself she was prepared for it. She had been wrong about that in the specific way you were always wrong when you tried to prepare for something real. The abstract version of a pain and the lived version of it were never the same size. You thought you knew the weight of something and then you picked it up and discovered you had been wrong by a significant amount.The silence had a texture. Not cold. Not angry in the obvious way. Something emptier than either of those things. It was the silence of someone who had removed you from the room they were living in. Not locked the door against you. Not posted a sign. Simply ceased to include you in the space where they existed. Linda's number was in her phone. Zara looked at it sometimes in the evenings when the flat was quiet. She did not call.She had moved back to her flat the day af

Forty Nine

The short-term let was on the fourth floor of a converted industrial building near the office. High ceilings, metal window frames, the bones of something that had been a warehouse before someone with vision and a budget had decided it could be something else. It was clean and functional and entirely without personality, which was either appropriate or unbearable depending on the hour and the particular quality of the quiet.Ethan made it through the first week by working.He was at the office before anyone else arrived and he left after most people had gone and in the hours between he was more focused than he had been in months. The irony of that was not lost on him. The thing that had been making him distracted had been named and the naming of it had clarified something. He was no longer managing two versions of his life simultaneously. He was only managing one and it turned out one was considerably more manageable than two.Daniel noticed the change. He said nothing about it directl

Fifty

The restaurant commission saved her.Not in the dramatic sense. Not in the way people used that word when they meant something had pulled them back from an edge. She had not been at an edge. She had been in the long difficult middle of something and the commission saved her from that middle in the specific way that the right work always saved her, by giving her somewhere to put her full attention where the attention was genuinely required and where the result of giving it was visible and real and good.The site was a Victorian building on a street she knew well, three floors, narrow, the kind of building that had been three different things over its lifetime and was about to become a fourth. The ground floor was to be the main restaurant space. The upper floors a private dining room and a bar that would operate separately in the evenings. The client was a chef named Paul who had strong opinions about the kitchen layout and the relationship between kitchen and floor and almost no opini

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