CHAPTER 6 — NOWHERE
1480 Words
He was quiet for a long moment after she asked.
Long enough that she started to think he was not going to answer at all, that he was just going to stand there looking at her until she gave up and left, which honestly felt like something he was capable of. She had met composed people before. She had never met anyone quite this composed.
Then he said, "It goes nowhere."
She looked at him.
"What happened," he said, "was one night. That is all it can be."
His voice was even. Not cold exactly, not the way someone was cold when they were trying to hurt you, but flat in the way of someone who had made a decision and was delivering it cleanly because they thought that was kinder than dragging it out. He sounded like a man closing a case file. Moving on to the next one.
"You're Cormac's fiancée," he said.
"Former," she said.
"As of last night," he said.
She said nothing to that.
"I'm re-entering the family after ten years," he said. "There are people involved in that. People with history and stakes in how it goes. What happened between us puts all of that at risk and I'm not willing to do that."
She stood very still and listened to all of it. She was good at listening. She had learned a long time ago that people told you the most when they thought you were just quietly taking in what they said. They got comfortable. They filled the silence. They showed you the edges of things they had not meant to show.
She watched his edges.
He was standing by the desk with his jacket on and his hands in his pockets and he was looking at her, mostly. Mostly. When he got to the part about one night and that is all it can be his eyes moved slightly to the left, just for a second, just long enough for her to notice, and then came back to her face.
She noticed.
She noticed the way he had said it can be rather than it is. The way he had listed the reasons in the order of most practical first rather than most true first, which was what people did when they were building a case rather than stating a fact. The way his hands were in his pockets, which was not how he had been standing for the rest of the conversation.
She had a whole paragraph ready in response to all of that.
She decided not to use it.
She picked up her bag from the floor and slung it over her shoulder and looked at him one more time. He looked back at her with that careful expression and she thought that he was very good at this, whatever this was, this performance of certainty, and that it had probably worked on a lot of people.
"Okay," she said.
Something moved in his face. He had expected more. She could see that. He had braced for an argument and she had said okay and now he did not quite know what to do with that and she found that privately satisfying.
She walked to the door.
She did not turn around.
"I'm a psychology student," she said to the door. "I've been studying human behaviour for three years. I write papers on it. I sit across from people every week at my internship and I listen to them say one thing while every signal their body is sending says something else entirely."
She heard him say nothing behind her.
"I know the difference between a man who means what he says," she said, "and a man who is saying what he thinks he should."
She opened the door and walked out and the latch clicked shut behind her.
~
The corridor was empty and long and very quiet. She walked to the lift and pressed the button and stood there and that was when she remembered her phone.
She had not looked at it since the bar last night. She had turned it face down and left it and then fallen asleep and then the morning had happened and she had not thought about it once. She dug it out of her bag now and turned the screen on.
The notifications loaded slowly, one after another, stacking up until the screen was full of them.
Cormac. Fourteen messages. She scrolled through without opening them. The first few were from last night, short and slightly panicked, where are you and please call me and Tamsin we need to talk. Then around midnight the tone changed. I can explain. It was a mistake. Please just come home so we can talk about this. Then this morning, two missed calls and a final message that said I love you and I know I messed up but please don't do anything you'll regret.
She put those away without responding.
Lianne. Nine messages. She did not read a single one. She pressed her thumb on Lianne's name and held it until the option came up to delete the thread entirely and she pressed delete and watched it disappear.
She did not feel ready to examine how much that hurt so she moved on.
Her dad. Six missed calls. Three messages. The first one was from last night, sent at eleven, just saying call me when you can, love. The second was from midnight, more concerned, Tamsin where are you, Cormac says you left, are you okay. The third was from this morning, early, just call me please.
She pressed call on his name and lifted the phone to her ear and it rang twice before he picked up.
"Tamsin," he said immediately, and the relief in his voice made her close her eyes for a second.
"Hi Dad," she said. "I'm okay. I'm coming home."
"Where have you been?" he asked. "I've been worried sick."
"I just needed some time," she said. "I'm getting a cab now. I'll explain when I get there."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Cormac called this morning."
"I know," she said.
"He said there was a misunderstanding," her dad said carefully.
She almost laughed. "I'll explain when I get there," she said again, and said goodbye and hung up before the conversation could go somewhere she did not have the energy for yet.
The lift arrived. She got in and looked at herself in the mirrored panel while the floors ticked down. Pale and bare faced and tired in a way that had nothing to do with not sleeping enough. The burgundy dress slightly wrinkled at the back. A faint mark on her neck that she was not going to think about.
The lobby. The revolving door. The cold morning air outside.
She stood on the steps and was about to put her phone away when a notification came through. i********:. She almost ignored it but the name on the notification stopped her.
Cormac Ashby tagged you in a post.
She opened it.
It was a photo from last night. Early in the evening, before everything, the two of them standing together at the party with champagne glasses and the venue looking beautiful behind them. She remembered the moment, someone had called their names and they had turned and smiled automatically. She had not known it was being taken. She looked happy in it. Or she looked like someone who was very good at looking happy, which she supposed was the same thing from the outside.
The caption read, *To the woman who said yes. The beginning of forever. I love you.*
Four hundred and twelve likes. Dozens of comments. Congratulations and heart emojis and people she barely knew telling her she was glowing.
She scrolled down through the comments slowly.
And then she stopped.
One comment near the top, posted forty minutes ago, liked by nobody yet because it was too new.
The username was just initials. I.A.
The comment said, Funny. She didn't mention a fiancé.
Her stomach dropped.
She read it again. Then she looked at the likes on the post, all four hundred and twelve of them, and she thought about Idris upstairs in that room with his jacket on and his case file closed and his voice saying it goes nowhere, and she thought about his eyes going slightly left, and she thought about a man who said one thing and did another before she had even made it to the ground floor.
She screenshotted the comment.
Then she found Cormac's last message, the one that said I love you and I know I messed up, and she typed back one line.
I will make sure everyone knows.
She turned her phone off and put it in her bag and walked down the steps to wait for her cab.
- Writer
