I picked my phone back up.
It was concussion.
It was absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent concussion. The doctor had said there was a bump. Bumps did things to the brain. Neurological things. Things that made you hear laughter in empty rooms and feel watched by your own four walls.
I nodded to myself.
Concussion.
I opened chapter four.
Chapter 8
Nika
The apartment door creaked open.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, one hand on the handle, and listened.
Silence. No television. No movement.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
The relief hit me so fast I had to put my hand on my chest. I exhaled slowly, let my shoulders drop from where they’d been sitting somewhere around my ears since the Tube, and stepped inside.
Shoes off. On the mat. Jacket on the hook. Muscle memory, same as always—except nothing else was the same as always and I was starting to feel that more clearly with every breath.
I rolled my suitcase down the hall and stopped at the kitchen doorway.
The counters were covered in empty Tupperware boxes—my labelled, portioned, colour-coded Tupperware boxes, pulled out of the freezer and emptied and left where they fell. Cereal boxes. An open peanut butter jar with the knife still in it. The sink was piled high with dishes that hadn’t even made a passing attempt at being rinsed.
My eyes dropped to the floor.
I wished, briefly and sincerely, for my old eyesight back. Ignorance had been a gift I hadn’t appreciated.
The living room was worse in a different way. Empty cans. Bottles. Snack wrappers that hadn’t quite made it to the bin, distributed across the coffee table and the floor around it like the aftermath of a very sad one-man festival. The throw I’d bought was bunched on the floor. The cushions were somewhere they shouldn’t be.
Five days.
He’d done all of this in five days.
The bathroom wasn’t so bad. I’d steeled myself. I managed fine until I looked inside the toilet and then I had to close the lid and take a moment.
I walked to the bedroom.
There was a folded sheet of A4 on my pillow. Lined paper, biro. His handwriting.
We need to talk. I’ll be living at my mum’s for a few days.
Finley.
I read it twice.
Then I set it back down on the pillow and stood very still while my mind quietly, efficiently began to move ahead.
His name wasn’t on the lease. It had never been on the lease—that had always been mine, my name, my responsibility, my credit check. At the time I’d told myself it was just practical. Now it felt like the first sensible thing I’d ever accidentally done.
