Chapter 7: I HAD NEVER FELT AS LONELY AS THIS
Chapter 7
Lumi
My hand was still raised.
His cheek had a faint flush creeping across it where my palm had landed, and he was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before.
His face moved from surprise to anger then to surprise all over again, in the space of 5 seconds.
I was certain my face looked no different.
Because I hadn’t planned it. My hand had moved before my mind could catch up and now it was hanging in the air between us and neither of us was breathing.
He stood slowly, straightened to his full height and looked at me, I couldn’t read what was in his eyes. Then he walked past me toward the front door.
I didn’t move. I heard the door open, then close behind him, quiet and controlled. A soft, final click that somehow felt worse than if he had shouted.
Then I heard the bike start, then nothing. I was still standing in the middle of the living room when I noticed my hands were shaking.
A persistent tremor running from my fingertips up through my wrists, the adrenaline had already done its work but it seems like my body hasn’t caught up with the fact that it’s over.
I pressed them together, and held them still.
l wasn’t scared because I knew he wouldn’t do anything to me. Even though I couldn’t recognise this Ren, I knew the little Ren was still in there and he wouldn’t hurt me.
But I hadn’t expected his reaction either. I’d expected something like cutting words or smile. Something to push back against so I would have somewhere to put all of this that was sitting inside my chest.
Instead he had simply gone, the same way he always went, and I was alone again with the sound of my own heartbeat loud in my ears.
I walked to the front door and turned the lock, then I slid down it until I was sitting on the floor with my back against the wood, knees pulled up. I pressed my face into my hands and let it come.
The tears arrived from somewhere low and deep, the kind you have no control over.
Was she right? Was she right about me?
Was he right too? Was that what I was? Was I bitter? Was it why Callum cheated? Because I was a bitter woman? Was it my fault?
I pressed the backs of my hands against my eyes like I could push the question back out again, but it had already taken root.
Because the truth was I had slapped a man who had done nothing to me today except walk through a door and sit on a sofa.
He had been blunt and careless with his words, yes, but I had raised my hand to him in someone else’s house.
He was gone. But I was here, on the floor, in this empty house and all the careful, small progress I had made since I arrived here, had dissolved like it had never existed at all.
When will it all go away. Will I ever be fine? Will this shallow feeling ever go away? This guilt and disappointment?
I sat and cried until my throat hurt. Until my face felt hot and swollen and there was nothing left in me.
I sat there in the silence for a long time after, breathing slowly, my back against the door.
At some point my eyes closed. When I opened them again, the light coming through the front window was different.
The flat, grey brightness of morning had shifted into the warm amber of late afternoon and when I looked at my phone the time read quarter past two.
I had fallen asleep on the floor.
I sat up slowly. My neck ached and my legs had gone numb underneath me, my face felt tight from dried tears.
I pushed myself upright and stood, pressing one hand against the door frame while feeling came back into my feet in slow, painful pulses.
My stomach made a sound that was not subtle but I ignored it. Now wasn’t time for food, there was no way it could pass through my mouth.
I walked back to the bedroom instead of the kitchen, climbed onto the bed still in my clothes from this morning, and lay on my back staring at the ceiling.
The duvet was warm around me even though I hadn’t pulled it over myself and the room smelled faintly of Neve’s fabric softener.
I had never felt as lonely as this in my life.
Not even in London those first months before I found my footing, not even in the long, silent evenings when Callum worked late and I ate dinner alone, not even the night I first understood something was wrong in my marriage and couldn’t name what it was yet.
This was a different kind of lonely. The kind that settles into your bones and sits there. The kind that makes the walls of even a familiar room feel like they are leaning slightly inward.
My phone sat on the nightstand, I looked at it. Every part of me wanted to call Neve.
I knew she would pick up before the second ring. She would say something steady and warm and she would make the walls feel less close.
But I also knew what would happen next, because I knew her, I knew exactly what kind of person she was.
And if I called her right now with this voice and this silence behind me she would be booking a flight before we had even finished talking and she would call it nothing, she would frame it as wanting to come home.
But she had worked too hard for this contract, this job and this life she was building for me to be the reason she walked away from it.
I wouldn’t do that to her. No, I wouldn’t.
