The date at the top of the screen.17 May.
I stare until the number stops being a number.
May the seventeenth. The date on his passport read upside-down the morning he pulled it out. The day lodged without intention, because collecting small data about him had become a habit I hid.
Today.
Thirty-two today.
I sit up too fast. Blood does the wrong thing. I grip the mattress edge.
Thirty-two minus nineteen. Thirteen. The three months are done. He’s thirty-two, and I am not in his kitchen, and nobody is cooking anything, and the pen he gave me in February is zipped inside the bag at the foot of this bed because I haven’t been able to look at it for a week.
I stand up. Wallet.
Piccadilly. Stationer’s on Oldham Street because pens were the vocabulary. I stand in front of a case of fountain pens for maybe eleven minutes. Everyone is wrong, too shiny. Too new. Wrong-handed. The girl behind the counter asks if I need help, and I say no, and she reads my face and stops asking.
Out with nothing.
Secondhand bookshop near the university. Analysis textbooks, he owns them. The dedications inside other people’s copies aren’t his dedications. Nothing fits.
Nothing.
A bakery window withHappy Birthdayin blue icing on a round chocolate sponge, and the thought arrives flat: I can’t hand Laurence Haldrey a supermarket cake on his thirty-second.
I walk on.
Back at the tram stop with empty hands and a pocket full of coins I didn’t spend.
Don’t call. Don’t text. Any message today is a message about today, and today is a day he isn’t going to let me touch.
The rain starts.
Thirty-two and I am the stain next to his career, and this is the birthday I am giving him—nothing. A stationer’s, I walked out of. A cake I didn’t buy. A silence that is the most considered thing I have ever tried to offer him.
Fallowfield tram. Halls. I unzip the bag at the foot of the bed and take the pen out for the first time in a long time. He bought it knowing how I hold things—knowing how I move.
I uncap it. The notebook on the desk is open to a proof I was doing eight days ago, the proof now looking like a thing that doesn’t belong to anyone.
One line in the margin. Small.
Happy birthday.
The message stays. There is nowhere to send it.
Cap the pen, put it down.
The stain on the ceiling. The bed, the dark coming in.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The key turns stiff.
The brass catches in the Yale like it catches when the weather’s been wet, which in Manchester is every day, so I’ve been jiggling this lock since October, and it’s muscle memory now: insert, lift, turn, push. But today the mechanism hesitates—a fraction of a second where the tumblers don’t want to commit.
The door opens.
The flat smells different. Usually it’s coffee, paper, and ironed cotton. Today: cold. The heating’s off. The kitchen light is on, but the rest of the flat is dark.
