All Chapters of Staying with him: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

60 Chapters

CHAPTER 31-From The Stands

She made it to her seat with eight minutes to spare, out of breath from the walk up from the station and the run until two, and the south stand was already most of the way full around her, the Saturday hum of it building toward three o’clock. She had a seat she liked. She had worked out over eight matches, nine, which part of the stand gave her the best line on the half he tended to start in, and she sat there now with her coat still on and a cup of coffee that was not good but was warm, and she found him on the pitch the way she always found him, immediately, without having to search. He had patterns before a match. She knew them now the way she knew his patterns at home, the order he did his stretches in, the two short sprints, the moment near the end of the warm-up where he stopped and put his hands on his hips and looked up into the stands. He did it every time. She had asked him about it once and he had said he was just looking, and she had not believed that was the whole of i

CHAPTER 32- The Architect

Remi was already at the table when Olivia arrived,which had never once happened in eight months offriendship, and there was a bottle of red open in frontof her with one glass poured and a second waiting,which was how Olivia knew before she had her coatoff that something was wrong.You are early, Olivia said.I have been here forty minutes, Remi said. I have readthe menu enough times to have opinions about thefont. Sit down. We are drinking.Olivia sat down. She hung her coat on the back of thechair instead of folding it into her lap, which was asmall thing she had taught herself to do, the not-bracing, the arriving properly. What happened.I quit, Remi said, and pushed the second glass acrossthe table. On Tuesday. I walked into Geoff's oﬃce andI gave four weeks and I have spent every hour sincethen alternating between feeling like a genius andwanting to be sick in a bin.You loved that firm.I loved being able to say I worked there. Remi turnedher own glass without drin

CHAPTER 33-The Drive Up

You are doing it again, Damien said, somewhere pastOxford.Doing what.The thing where you are extremely calm aboutsomething you are not calm about. You went very stillabout twenty minutes ago. You have been watchingthe motorway like it owes you money.They were on the M40 with the boot full of presentsand a tin of mince pies sitting on the back seat thatOlivia had bought from a good bakery and decantedinto one of her own tins, which she had decided wasnot deception so much as a small mercy to everyoneinvolved, including herself. The rain had set in pastBeaconsfield and had not let up, the wipers keepingtheir patient time, the country going by flat and greyand enormous. He was driving. She had offered, at theflat, and he had said he liked driving, and she had lethim have it, which two years ago she could not havedone.I am not nervous, she said.You changed your jumper twice this morning.That was temperature.The flat was twenty degrees. You stood in front of thewardr

CHAPTER 34-Her Father

The house smelled the way it had smelled her entirechildhood, a smell she could not have described to astranger but knew in her body the instant the dooropened, gravy and radiator dust and her mother'shand cream and, underneath all of it, something olderand unnameable that was just the house being thehouse she had grown up in.Her mother hugged her too long in the hallway, theway she always did, holding on a beat pastcomfortable so that Olivia had to be the one to end it.Then she turned to Damien and took both his hands inboth of hers and looked up at him and said, you arevery tall, which was her mother's entire approvalsystem delivered as raw data, and accepted the tin ofmince pies without a single word about the fact thatthey were plainly from a bakery, which meant she hadclocked it in half a second and chosen grace, whichwas so precisely her mother that Olivia had to busyherself with the coats.Her father shook Damien's hand in the front room andsaid, good drive.

CHAPTER 35-Maya

Maya arrived on Boxing Day at eleven in the morningwith the baby, a bag the approximate size of a smallfridge, and the wild, hollow-eyed energy of a womanwho had not slept a full night in four months and haddriven forty minutes on fumes and spite.Take her, Maya said, by way of hello, and put the babyinto Olivia's arms before Olivia had finished standingup, and walked straight past her toward the kitchenand the kettle and ten unbroken minutes of being aperson who was not currently holding another person.The baby was called Esme. She was three and a halfmonths old and she looked up at Olivia with thedeeply unimpressed expression of a small magistratereserving judgement. Olivia stood in her parents'hallway holding her niece and felt the real and slightlyalarming weight of her, the warmth coming off her, thefact of a whole entire person who had not existed atall the last Christmas she stood in this hallway.She is heavier than she looks, Damien said, appearingat Olivia's

CHAPTER 36-The Quiet Letter

They drove back south on the twenty-eighth into aLondon that had emptied itself out for the strangedead week between Christmas and the new year, thestreets soft and underpopulated, half the shops dark,the whole city holding its breath in the way it only didfor those few grey days a year. The flat when they letthemselves into it was cold and unlit and entirely,perfectly theirs, and Olivia stood in the middle of itwith her coat still on and felt the specific deep relief ofcoming home from somewhere that had gone well.The post was on the mat. He scooped it up with thekeys still in his hand, the usual fan of envelopes, andshe watched him, without meaning to watch him, gothrough them standing up, and she saw him stop onone.Thick paper. Cream, not white. A small printed crest inthe corner that she half knew and could not place.Addressed to him, his full name, the formal versionnobody used. He looked at it a half-second longerthan a person looks at a circular or a bank sta

CHAPTER 37- Marcus

She came home on a Thursday evening to find astranger sitting at her kitchen table, except that hewas not a stranger, she understood inside a second,because Damien was talking to him in a voice she hadheard exactly twice before in her life and only everleaking out of a phone held to his ear.The sharp voice. The deliberate one. The version ofhim that surfaced for precisely one person on earth.This is Marcus, Damien said.Coach Marcus was older than she had built him in herhead, well into his sixties, with the frame of a manwho had been a serious athlete a very long time agoand had held on to just enough of it to make a kitchenfeel small. He stood up to shake her hand, which shehad not expected, and he kept hold of her eye while hedid it, which she had expected even less, and he said,so you are Olivia, in a tone that told her plainly she hadbeen a subject of discussion.I am, she said.Heard a lot about you, Marcus said. None of it out ofhim, you understand. He does not

CHAPTER 38-Sunday

There was nothing to do and nowhere to be, and the whole of one grey wet Sunday in February simply stopped and let them off the hook.She woke late, which she never did. He was already awake but had not got up, which he never did. And so they lay there in the unhurried half-dark with the rain working steadily at the window and no reason on earth to move and, crucially, no spoken agreement to stay, which was the better thing, the staying that came from neither of them suggesting they get up.Eventually he went and made eggs, and she sat on the kitchen counter while he did it, wearing one of his shirts and nothing useful, holding her coffee, her bare feet hooked over the edge of a drawer, and they talked about nothing. They argued amiably about a documentary they had each fallen asleep during at different points. They debated whether the plant in the bathroom was genuinely dying or merely, as she maintained, dramatic. He burned the first egg badly and swore at the pan with real feeling

CHAPTER 39- The Thing He Is Not Saying

By the middle of March she could no longer pretend,with any conviction, that she had not noticed.It had been building for the better part of two months,slowly enough that on any single day she couldpersuade herself she was imagining it, that he wastired, that the season was long, that she wasimporting tension that was not there. It was only whenshe let herself look at the whole two months laid endto end that she could see the line of it, the slow steadydecline of something in him that had nothing to dowith how he was with her.Because he was not unhappy with her. She was nearlycertain of that, and the nearly was its own smalltorment. He reached for her exactly as much as healways had. He came home the same, ate dinner thesame, slept with his arm out the same so she couldfind the space in the dark. Whatever the weight was, itwas not about them, and that single fact was the onlything that let her keep carrying it without coming apartat the seams.But he was carrying so

CHAPTER 40- Priya Says The Thing

You are doing the face, Priya said.I am not doing a face.You are absolutely doing the face. The managingface. I have known that face for eleven years. You didthat exact face at university when you found outabout the thing with Daniel, do you remember, youwent and made everyone tea and rearranged theentire kitchen and did not cry for nine days, and thencried, if memory serves, for about two.They were in Priya's kitchen, which was small andloud and the precise opposite of Olivia's flat, everysurface covered in a child's drawing or a singleabandoned sock, a bottle of wine open between themthat neither of them was really drinking because Priyahad to be up at six with the children. Olivia had comeover on a Wednesday evening without admittingclearly to herself why she had come.There is a thing, Olivia said.There is always a thing. You do not come over on aschool night because you are relaxed. Tell me thething.So she told her. The cream envelope on the second ofJanuary,

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