“I’ll not have you speak ill of Moira Ramsay’s cooking in this house, thank you very much.”
“I wouldn’t dream of impugning Moira Ramsay’s honor, but her son is fair game.”
He smiles as he slides me a cutting board with an onion balanced on it. With a deft flick of his wrist, he pulls a knife from the block and flips it around to point at me, handle first. “A fine dice, if you don’t mind.”
I set to work peeling the onion and wonder how much metaphorical onion peeling I can do at the same time—I have roughly six hundred questions about his mom alone. “Is she here in Liverpool?”
“No, back up in Oban. She was here at the weekend, helping me get settled and keeping me up to my eyeballs in lobster she brought from home. You should see the freezer—chockablock with the poor wee bastards.” He’s uncapped the container of stock but frowns mid-pour. “Sorry, I should have had you over while she was here. I didn’t even think about it. Bad friend.”
“Yes, I can’t believe you didn’t invite the coworker you’ve known for, like, twelve days to meet your mom.”
His frown deepens, veering into actual disappointed territory. “Not sure what twelve days has to do with it. You went to uni, right? Didn’t you meet people during your first week that you knew in your bones would be your friends forever? Whenever I change teams, I go into it with the excitement of knowing I’m about to meet some lifers.”
“Yeah, but that’s yourteam. You’re expected to gel like that. Surely you don’t feel that way about minor back-office staff?” Jesus, why am I arguing with him? Why am I making him work so hard to be my friend? This is an entirely new form of self-sabotage. It’s like after Steven, I’ve got my guard perpetually up, waiting for something to go wrong, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Luckily, the onion chooses this moment to sting my eyes and I blink the tears away with a sniffle.
“Ha!” he says. “The delicious tears of a defeated opponent.”
I wipe my hands on a towel and shove the onion toward him. “It’s a violation of the Geneva Convention to attack me with a biological weapon.”
“All’s fair in risotto and war.”
“You should embroider that on a throw pillow for your mom.”
He scrapes the onion into the pan with the knife, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “Listen, all I’m saying is that I’m glad I walked down your corridor at some point during the seventeen straight hours you were googling me.”
“Me too.” I raise my whisky at him.
He responds to my toast by taking a sip of the lobster stock straight from the container. His lips pucker. “Oof, that is potent.” He nods to my laptop bag. “Now come on, cue up your machine there. We’ve got thirty minutes of stirring and stewing, which should be enough time for me to teach even you the offside rule.”
Chapter Seven
The morning after my dinnerwith Lachlan, I wake up in Amina’s childhood bed and am blessed with the most glorious two minutes of disorientation. When I reach out my arm and it doesn’t hit the slumbering form of my fiancé, my subconscious adjusts to its surroundings and runs me through the options: Steven and I have drawn the short straw on a group trip and taken the kids’ room in our Airbnb. Or we’re in that odd hotel in Germany where we each had our own narrow bed and comforter. Or it’s Christmas with his grandmother, an old-school Connecticut WASP who insists that we sleep in separate bedrooms until we’re actually married. My mind comforts itself with these alternate realities for the time it takes me to rise out of the fuzzy swirl of my dream state and into full consciousness.
But when I open my eyes for real and behold the frosted-tip horsemen of the Apocalypse, the painful truth comes screaming back to me. My arm doesn’t hit the slumbering form of my fiancé not because of the bed I’m in but because he isn’t there anymore. He’s waking up next to someone else now, our entire relationship reduced to an awkward, uncomfortable footnote in the whitewashed history he’s writing with her.
Of course I’ve had this realization over and over again in thelast few weeks, but some mornings it’s worse than others. What’s more, the numbness I felt after the breakup has morphed into something deeper, stranger. Though my attempt to rebuild my life is taking little stuttering steps forward, my body is at the same time contorting, diminishing into its new, solo self, keenly and profoundly confused by the persistent absence of Steven. My defaults are all wrong; my pronouns are stuck onweinstead ofme.Because even in the twilight of our relationship, even as Steven’s lies became more overt and my apathy more pronounced, he was stillthere. Still in our bed most nights. Still the person with whom I coordinated everything: chores, meals, plans, finances. As the “business trips” became longer and more far-fetched, we nevertheless kept up the ruse—if not of our love, then at least of our partnership. Yes, we both saw the writing on the wall, but we remained locked in this perverse facsimile of reality. Stubbornly performing our respective roles to the bitter end, pantomiming our familiar routines until that one day, chosen for no discernible reason, when BAM! We were done.
Maybe that’s why my adjustment into singlehood now feels so jarring, so ungainly: There was no hospice for our shared life, no period of transition as “we” died. “Abby and Steven”—the concept—trundled along until the bitter end, long after Abby and Steven—the people—gave up, and I’m left with all these deeply ingrained habits that I cannot seem to break. But there is no need for me to keep checking for my fiancé in my bed every morning. No need to wonder what he wants to do for dinner every night. No need to consult him about big purchases or big plans. No. I’m here, halfway between Manchester and Liverpool, in the faded flannel sheets of my childhood pen pal, totally alone.
Needless to say, it’s a remarkable comedown from twelve hoursago, when I was eating lobster risotto in Liverpool’s finest penthouse apartment.
I know time heals all wounds, but I also know I have to be very careful with my thoughts and actions until time can do its thing. If I let my mind go undistracted for more than a few minutes, I will sink back into the numbness, the self-recrimination about the mistakes I made and the life I’ve so rashly left behind. If I indulge the intrusive thoughts screaming at me that I’m going to fail at this just like I failed at my relationship, I won’t have the courage to keep putting one foot in front of the other, stumbling my way into whatever awaits me here on this side of the pond, on this side of my heartbreak.
And that’s why I decide to treat myself like a rambunctious kindergartner. I will structure every possible minute of my day, keeping my brain so distracted that it simply has no time for an outburst. This weekend, that means pouring all my energy into making flashcards: for every member of the Mersey squad, for the entire coaching staff, even for the ladies who serve lunch in the cafeteria (though the absence of Wikipedia pages for them makes their cards a bit light on facts). Then I run through them like I’m cramming for my AP Spanish final. By the end of the weekend, I’ve become intimately familiar with large swaths of the Mersey F.C. organization.
My plan seems to work, because when I wake Monday morning, my first thought isnotabout Steven or his absence, it’s that the players return from their summer holidays today. This fills me with the energy of a kid before her first day at a new school: I’m excited and anxious and a little bit queasy. It’s an alien feeling; I haven’t been excited to wake up and face the day for a long time. Even my horrible commute from the Iqbals’—a bus to a train toa bus—is manageable, though my hands tremble with nerves as I do one final run-through of the players’ flashcards. I have so many questions about what they’ll be like. Is Lachlan the rule or the exception? Am I about to make twenty-five new best friends or have I memorized an excessive number of facts about people I’ll only ever interact with through a camera lens?
Over coffee in the staff cafeteria, Phil Harrison and I run through the day’s agenda. He’s a camera wizard and general media savant, and has quickly become my favorite coworker. Tall and lanky with an endearing face, a quiet air, and an encyclopedic knowledge of football, he moved up here from London five years ago and has been with the club ever since.
Not only is it the players’ first day back, it’s also Media Day, when reporters come to interview the new and returning squad, the manager, the coaching staff, and pretty much anyone else they can shove a mic in front of. It’s going to be wall-to-wall chaos—perfect for distracting me. Phil and I start our day by filming the players’ reactions for when they score. I’ve seen this on Mersey’s social media channels: quick clips of players grabbing the team’s logo on their shirts, or smiling into the camera, or doing whatever their patented goal-scoring gesture is. (My personal favorites are Fernando Herrera, a Spanish striker who does the Macarena—though he wasn’t even born when the song came out—and Laurent Mendy, a Senegalese midfielder and massiveLord of the Ringsfan who shoots a pretend bow-and-arrow into the stands.)
We grab our coffees and head into the atrium, where the camera crew are just finishing setting up in front of a green screen. Phil motions me to stand in for some test shots. He adjusts the tripod while I vogue with one hand and try not to spill my coffee with the other. The lights are hot and blinding, and I’m grateful Ionly have to be in front of them for fifteen seconds. Then the players trickle in and it’s time to get to work.
As it turns out, Lachlan is first on the agenda. But his appointed time slot comes and goes, and ten minutes later there’s still no sign of him. The schedule is packed so tightly that even a minor delay will cascade through the rest of the day, so I’m not sure what the protocol is here.
“The media liaisons are normally good about keeping the lads on track,” says Phil. “Maybe an interview’s running long? Let me go check.”
“No need,” comes a familiar Scottish accent from over my shoulder. Lachlan appears with a cup of coffee in his hand and an unbelievably weary expression etched deep in every line of his face. “I’m here.”
