Chapter 3 Back in Town
1405 Words
She didn’t reply that night.
She’d made the decision at nine forty-three, phone face down, and she’d kept it through the rest of the evening and all the way to bed and most of the next morning. It wasn’t nothing. Ten years of muscle memory said respond, make it easy, and smooth it over—and she’d sat with her hands in her lap and not done it.
At eleven-fifteen on Friday, her hands decided before her brain could intervene.
Hey. Yeah, been here a few months. You?
She read it back. Casual. Unbothered. The textual equivalent of a shrug.
She sent it.
***
His reply came in four minutes.
Just got back a few weeks ago, actually. Still finding my feet.
She read it standing at the kitchen counter.
Still finding my feet. Like he’d been travelling. Like London was a city he’d stepped away from briefly and was now pleasantly reacquainting himself with. Not like he’d left for a reason. Not like there was a kitchen and a six-in-the-morning and a whale keychain involved in any of it.
She typed, "How's work?"
Not the real questions. Just work. Safe ground.
New project, he wrote back. Logistics company, started when I got back. You know how it is—easier to just get into something straight away.
Yeah, she typed. Keeps everything moving.
Exactly that.
She put the phone down, drank her coffee, looked out the window, and thought about the word "exactly" and how much it didn’t need to do what it was doing to her.
The conversation moved through the day in short intervals.
Gaps of an hour, sometimes more, which she told herself proved she wasn’t waiting for them. He’d send something easy, and she’d answer easily. On the surface, it was just two people exchanging words. Underneath it, the current was moving fast, and neither of them went near it.
Still in Clerkenwell? He asked around noon.
Keswick now. New place.
That’s a good area. How is it?
"Good light in the mornings," she wrote. Which was the main requirement.
She sent it and then sat with the fact that she’d sent it—because three years ago she’d told him that, in the middle of a conversation about something else, the way you gave people the small true things when you weren’t paying attention to what you were handing over was special.
He’d kept it.
She’d have preferred he hadn’t.
That’s very you, he wrote.
Two seconds later: I mean that well.
She looked at that for a moment. Put the phone down. Picked it up. Put it down again.
"I know," she typed eventually.
Which was either the right response or a door left slightly open. She wasn’t sure which one and didn’t examine it too closely.
At three, he asked about Priya.
"Same," Nora wrote. Making the ragu on Thursday. Which means I’ll eat sometime around nine-thirty if I’m lucky.
A pause. Then his reply: the eternal ragu. Some things don’t change.
And before she could stop herself—before she could apply any kind of filter—she wrote back, "Some things really don't."
She stared at the screen.
Three words, and she’d handed him something. She wasn’t entirely sure what. Just something she hadn’t meant to give yet.
She put the phone face down and opened her laptop and worked for an hour without checking it, which she was fairly certain was the adult thing to do and was also extremely difficult.
He texted at five-forty while she was pulling her jacket on for a walk.
Can I ask you something?
She stopped with one arm in the sleeve.
"Depends," she wrote.
Fair. A pause. Are you actually okay? Like genuinely. I’ve been wondering.
She stood in the hall with her jacket half on and read that and felt something move through her that she wasn’t prepared for—not the question itself, but the "I've been wondering" attached to it. The implication of time spent. Of her existing in his thoughts while he was existing in hers.
She finished putting her jacket on.
Thought about the honest answer. Thought about all the versions of the honest answer and which one she was willing to give him.
Most days, she wrote. Some days are better than others. But mostly yes.
Good, he wrote. Then: I’m glad you’ve got the flat. The good-light flat.
"Me too," she typed.
She went for the walk.
***
It was dark by the time she got back.
She cooked, ate, washed up, and made tea, which she half-drank. Sat on the sofa with the book she’d not been reading for three days. The flat was quiet and warm and entirely hers, and she was fine, genuinely fine; the day had been—it had just been texts. Two people exchanging words. Nothing had been agreed upon, nothing had been offered, nothing had changed.
Her phone lit up at eight-twenty.
It’s strange being back, he wrote. Everything looks the same from the outside. I keep expecting it to feel the same, and it doesn’t.
She put the book down.
Read it twice.
This was unlike the rest of the day. There was an underside to this. She could feel the change in it, the conversation dropping a register, moving beneath the surface. She sat with it for a moment before answering.
Things look the same because they are the same, she wrote. You’re the thing that changed.
A longer pause than usual.
Yeah, he wrote. I think that’s right.
Then, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things since I got back. About what I did and didn’t do. About what I should have said when I had the chance to say it.
She was very still.
Her tea was going cold.
"Daniel…" she started typing.
Then deleted it.
Started again: That’s a lot to put in a text.
"I know," he wrote. I know it is. I’m not trying to... I’m not asking for anything. I just wanted you to know I haven’t been… I haven’t been fine about it either. If that matters.
She looked at that for a long time.
If that matters.
She thought about the kitchen. The jacket. The keychain. Four months of building something careful and quiet and entirely hers. She thought about the way his name on her screen that first night had activated something she’d spent weeks convincing herself was dormant.
It wasn’t dormant.
She’d known that by the second Zoom.
"It matters," she typed. Then immediately wished she could take it back. Then decided she didn’t.
"Thank you," he wrote.
A pause. She could feel him on the other side of it, feel the weight of something being considered.
“Then, I know I don’t have the right to ask this. I know that. But I’d really like to see you. Just coffee somewhere. Nothing heavy, no expectations. Just—I'd like to sit across from you.”
She read it.
Read it again.
Just sit across from you.
Not that “I want to explain or I think we should talk.” Just that. Simple and direct and more disarming than anything complicated would have been.
She sat with it for a long time.
Long enough that three different responses came and went without being typed.
Then she picked up the phone.
"You're right that you don’t have the right to ask," she wrote.
Sent it.
Watched the three dots appear.
Typed the second part before they could disappear: “But okay. Coffee. Somewhere public.”
She put the phone down.
Pressed her palms flat on her knees.
Outside, the street was quiet. The flat was warm. Everything was the same as it had been an hour before, but also completely different, and she sat in the middle of it, breathed, and told herself it was just coffee.
Her phone buzzed.
Thank you, he wrote. Really.
She looked at those two words for a long time.
Really, she thought.
Ten years. A kitchen at six in the morning. Four months of carefully rebuilt life. And here she was, sitting on her sofa at eight-thirty on a Friday night, having just agreed to coffee with the man she'd spent all of it trying to stop thinking about.
Just coffee, she told herself.
She almost believed it.
- Writer
