All Chapters of Affair With My Stepfather : Chapter 51 - Chapter 59

She wrote it on a Sunday morning.Not because Sunday had any particular significance. Because she had been composing it in her head for three weeks and on Sunday at six in the morning she woke with the whole thing present and fully formed and she understood that if she did not write it down that morning she was going to keep carrying it unwritten and the carrying of it unwritten was beginning to cost her in a way she could not afford.She made coffee. She sat at the desk by the window of her flat. She opened her laptop and she started.She wrote for two hours without stopping.The letter was not an apology in the simple sense and she had thought about that carefully before she began. An apology in the simple sense was I am sorry for what I did and she was not going to write something that small. Not because she was not sorry. She was sorry in ways she did not yet have full language for. But sorry as a word had a shape that implied the thing could be contained by it and this could not

She had forgotten how much she liked her flat.That was the thing that surprised her most about coming back to it. She had spent three months in her childhood bedroom and the warm kitchen of her mother's house and she had not thought much about her own space during that time, had thought of it as the place she was not rather than the place she was. Coming back had felt at first like a diminishment. The smaller life after the larger one. The quieter version.But the flat was hers in a way the house had not been, even during the months of Tuesday mornings and the hand at the back of her neck and all the particular intimacy of a secret held inside someone else's domestic life. This was the space she had made for herself with her own money and her own taste and her own understanding of what a room needed to do for the person living in it. The books on the shelves were books she had chosen. The colour on the kitchen wall was a colour she had spent three weekends deciding on. The desk by th

Linda's reply arrived on a Tuesday.Not a call. Not a text. A letter. Two pages, handwritten, in the slanted careful handwriting that Zara had grown up seeing on shopping lists and birthday cards and the notes her mother left on the kitchen counter when she went out early. The envelope had her name on the front in that same handwriting and she stood at her letterbox in the hallway of her building for a moment before she opened it because she understood that whatever was inside was going to matter and she wanted to be still before she read it.She went upstairs.She took her coat off. She made coffee she did not drink. She sat at the desk by the window and she opened the envelope and unfolded the two pages and began.The first page was hard.Not cruel. Not designed to wound. Just honest in the specific way that Linda had always been honest, directly and without decoration, saying the thing she meant rather than the thing that was easier. She wrote about the rehearsal dinner. She wrote

James met them outside at nine the following morning.He was tall, slightly younger than Ethan, with the relaxed confidence of someone who had been good at his work long enough to stop needing to demonstrate it. He shook Ethan's hand the way old colleagues shook hands, briefly and without ceremony, and then he turned to Zara and said he had seen the Aldren project and had been genuinely impressed and she thanked him genuinely because he said it the way people said things they meant rather than things they were required to say.The building was on a side street off the Royal Mile, not the tourist part, the residential end where the street narrowed and the buildings pressed close and the stone had the particular dark quality of Edinburgh stone that absorbed light differently from anything she had worked with before. Four storeys. Originally a merchant's townhouse from the early nineteenth century, converted to offices sometime in the nineteen seventies in ways that had not been kind to

The restaurant James chose was on a side street off George Street, small and warm and the kind of place that had been there long enough to have developed its own particular character without trying to. Dark wood, good lighting, a menu that was confident rather than ambitious. She liked it immediately.James's wife was called Ruth. She was small and precise with the particular energy of someone whose mind was always doing something even when the rest of her was still. She studied medieval urban history at the university and her current research was about the development of Edinburgh's street plan in the fourteenth century and she talked about it the way people talked about things they genuinely loved, without performing the love, just being inside it.Zara found her immediately interesting.They were seated at a round table, the four of them, and the wine arrived and the menus arrived and within ten minutes the conversation had split naturally into two, James and Ethan talking about th