Twelve Months To Ruin You

Catching Herself

It started with a grocery list.

Anne had never written a grocery list for another person in her life. She wrote them for herself, precise, categorized, nothing on there that wasn’t necessary. She’d been doing it since she was nineteen, when she started buying her own food.

She was standing in the kitchen on a Thursday morning writing her list for the weekend when her hand wrote *the coffee he likes* between oat milk and washing up liquid and she stared at it for a full four seconds before she crossed it out.

Then she stood there looking at the crossed-out line.

Then she wrote it again.

Put the pen down. Left the kitchen. Came back. Picked the list up. Told herself it was practical, they shared a kitchen, they both used coffee, it made sense to buy it together rather than have two separate coffee situations on the same counter. That was efficiency. Not anything else.

She took the list to the shop. She bought the coffee.

She put it on the counter when she got back and didn’t say anything about it.

Derrick came down at eight and made his coffee and didn’t say anything either. He just used it. Went to his chair. Opened his laptop.

Anne watched him from the kitchen and thought about the crossed-out line and felt deeply suspicious of herself.

****

The event on Thursday evening was a smaller one, fifteen people, a private dinner for some of Derrick’s investors, the kind of thing where everyone already knew each other and the scrutiny was different. More personal. Less crowd to hide in.

They were getting ready in their separate rooms and Anne was almost done when she came out into the hallway and Derrick was already there, jacket on, and she looked at him and said “your pocket square is crooked.”

“My what?”

“The pocket square. In your breast pocket. It’s crooked.”

He looked down at it. Looked up. “Fix it then.”

She blinked. “I….”

“You were going to anyway.” He said it completely matter-of-factly, no smirk, nothing teasing. “You’ve got the face.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You’ve been staring at my pocket square for six seconds.”

She walked over. Fixed it. Stepped back. Completely fine. Not a single thought about the tie situation from two weeks ago, that was a completely different thing, this was just a pocket square and she’d been asked.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t mention it.”

“I won’t.”

“Good.”

They went downstairs.

****

The dinner was at a private room in a restaurant in Uptown and everything was going reasonably well until one of the investors, a man called Warren who’d clearly had two drinks before they arrived, leaned across the table and said to Anne…. “So how did he finally get you to say yes? Derrick’s not exactly the easiest man to be with.”

The table went slightly quiet.

Anne looked at Warren. Warren looked pleased with himself.

“He cooked for me,” Anne said.

Derrick went very still beside her.

“Really.” Warren raised his eyebrows. “Derrick cooked.”

“He did.”

“What did he make?”

“Eggs.” Anne picked up her glass. “They were terrible. I was impressed he tried.”

Warren laughed loudly. Two other people at the table laughed. Derrick sat beside her with the expression of a man reassessing several things simultaneously.

“Terrible eggs,” Warren said. “That’s a love story.”

“It’s something,” Anne said pleasantly.

Later, after Warren had moved on to talking about a golf trip, Derrick leaned slightly toward her and said under his breath….“You didn’t have to tell them about the eggs.”

“You said to be convincing.”

“I didn’t say humiliate me.”

“Nobody’s humiliated. Warren thinks it’s charming.”

“Warren thinks everything is charming. He’s on his third drink.”

“Derrick.” She looked at him sideways. “He bought it completely. You’re welcome.”

He looked back at her. Something moved through his expression that wasn’t irritation exactly. “You’re very good at this.”

“You keep saying that.”

“You keep proving it.”

She looked away first. Again. She was really going to have to stop doing that.

****

Home at ten. The restaurant had done something with chocolate for dessert that Anne was still thinking about.

“That dessert,” she said in the elevator.

“I know.”

“What was in it?”

“I don’t know but I’ve been thinking about it for twenty minutes.”

“We should ask them.”

“I already texted the restaurant.”

She looked at him. “You texted the restaurant about the dessert.”

“I want to know what was in it.”

“That’s very human of you.”

“Was that a compliment?”

“It was an observation.”

The elevator opened. They went to the kitchen. She put the kettle on because she wanted tea and he got a glass of water and they existed in the kitchen at ten o’clock without it being strange and that was the problem she was trying not to look at directly.

Her phone buzzed. She looked at it. Maya, sending over something for tomorrow’s first meeting. She read through it leaning against the counter, scrolling, making a face at a figure that didn’t add up.

“What’s wrong with it?” Derrick said.

She looked up. “The figure on page three. Someone’s miscalculated the projected return.”

“By how much?”

“Enough that the client is going to ask questions I won’t have good answers to tomorrow morning.” She kept scrolling. “I need to fix this tonight.”

“How long?”

“Hour. Maybe less.”

He nodded. Got his water. Went to the living room. She heard the television come on low, not loud, just background, the kind of low that meant he wasn’t really watching it.

She worked at the kitchen counter. The tea went cold. She made another one. Fixed the figure, found two smaller errors near it, fixed those too, sent it back to Maya with notes.

At eleven thirty she looked up and realised the television had gone off.

She walked to the living room doorway.

Derrick was asleep on the couch.

Not dramatically, just sitting upright with his head tipped back and his arms crossed and his phone on his chest, completely out. He’d been waiting, she realised. Not doing anything, just in the same space while she worked, and he’d fallen asleep doing it.

She stood in the doorway.

She went to the hallway cupboard. Got the blanket. Came back.

She stood over him for a second and thought about how this was the same blanket he’d put over her three weeks ago when she’d fallen asleep with her case files, and now she was standing here holding it, and something about that made her feel a specific kind of way she was not going to name at eleven thirty on a Thursday night.

She put it over him.

Went to her room.

Sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her hands.

She’d bought his coffee without being asked. She’d fixed his pocket square because he’d asked her to and she’d done it without making it strange. She’d told a table of investors about his terrible eggs and made them believe in a relationship that didn’t exist. She’d worked in his kitchen for an hour and a half while he sat in the next room in case she needed something.

And she’d just put a blanket on a man she was supposed to be planning to kill.

She lay back and looked at the ceiling.

Her second attempt had failed. The gas valve, she’d found out three days later when she’d come home and the kitchen smelled completely normal and Derrick said he’d ordered in because he hadn’t felt like cooking. He hadn’t used the stove. Again, by accident, he’d avoided it.

Two attempts. Two accidental survivals. And now a blanket.

She closed her eyes.

“Get it together, Anne,” she said to the ceiling.

The ceiling didn’t respond.

It never did.