Rosie leapt to her feet and stared at him. She was furious with him for making her extract this confession as though it were forced and untrue, proffered only under torture.
‘You’ve got a funny way of showing it,’ Rosie spat back, anger finally flaring. ‘I’ve spent the best part of a decade washing your underpants and buying your mother’s birthday cards.’
James seemed to shrink back into the sofa cushions, intimidated by her ire. ‘I’m sorry. Really, I am.’
‘You still haven’t told mewhy. And I need to know. Help me make sense of all this.’ She felt the wordsI thought you were about to ask me to marry youdancing on the tip of her tongue and bit them back. She felt humiliated enough as it was.
‘Surely you can feel we’ve grown apart over the last few months,’ he said. ‘We don’t want the same things anymore – we don’t have as much in common. I’ve been concentrating on … building a better me, I suppose. That’s the journey I’m on now.’
Rosie ground her teeth. Beneath the sting of the clear implication that she was not committed to her own self-improvement, a sad voice in some recess of her mind whispered,Building a better me? The journey you’re on? And here was I thinking we were on that journey together.
Out loud, she said: ‘We haveeverythingin common. We live together. I’m the person your office rang when your appendix burst and you had to be rushed to hospital. You’ve bought me tampons from the corner shop. We jointly own a tumble dryer, for fuck’s sake!’
James deflated a little, as if this barrage of banal facts had knocked the wind out of his sails. After a moment, he drew himself up to look at her and said, ‘I don’t think I want those things anymore. I don’t want a “tumble dryer” kind of life.’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Rosie said, exasperated. ‘You don’t want a life where you can get clothes dry in the middle of winter?’
Not, she thought bitterly, that James would ever consider such a thing. She genuinely couldn’t remember the last time he’d done a load of washing.
‘I want a life of adventure!’ he cried, somewhat lamely. ‘This is precisely the problem! I don’t want to be focusing on this kind of stuff.’
Youdon’tfocus on ‘this kind of stuff’. You don’t have to, Rosie thought – realising with a sickening jolt that the care she took of him was not only under-appreciated, it apparently went entirely unnoticed.
It astounded Rosie that James seemed convinced she was holding him back in some way, when in fact she had enabled so much of his life. It cut her to the bone that he saw her presence as no more interesting or necessary than that of a standard domestic appliance they’d bought in the January sales two years ago.
‘SoI’mthe reason your life feels mundane?’ she asked, stifling a sob. Rosie’s heart throbbed. Every bad thing she’d ever thought about herself, every admonishment for not being slim or beautiful enough, every failed diet and every life-changing routine she’d abandoned … They all weighed on her so hard in this moment that she felt like she’d punctured a lung.
‘No!’ James cried, without conviction. ‘But you’recontent. I’m not.’
With his accusation ringing in her ears, Rosie noticed James’s eyes move towards his gym bag. With another lurch, she understood that he hadn’t simply dumped it on the floor on his return from a workout – he’d packed it in readiness for leaving her.
An icy fist squeezed her insides as she realised she hadn’t asked the most obvious question – that it hadn’t even occurred to her until now. ‘James, be honest with me, please,’ she said. ‘Is there someone else?’
‘No!’ he said again, his voice almost a yelp. ‘This is about me. About where I’m at and what I want.’
Rosie laughed bitterly. ‘More like what – and who – youdon’twant.’
Her eyes roamed the room, seeking comfort in the familiar. She found none as she took in the framed photograph of them on holiday in Crete, the wine rack full of ‘special occasion’ bottles and the bookcase that housed her most treasured novels, as well as his handful of non-fiction favourites. Everything she looked at spoke of their comfortable coexistence: of two lives woven together over long years, in a way she had never imagined unpicking.
As she turned back to look at James, Rosie noticed for the first time that there was an envelope on the sofa seat next to him. Her name was written on it in his haphazard, almost childlike scrawl.
She felt cool sweat begin beading on her skin, soaking the back of her neck. Her heartbeat drummed in her ears and her breathing grew shallow. She already knew the answer, but she asked the question anyway. ‘What’s that?’
‘Oh. Ah. It’s nothing,’ James said, extending a protective hand to cover it.
‘It’s not nothing. It’s an envelope,’ Rosie said, ‘and it’s got my name on it. Give it to me, please.’
‘Rosie, honestly – you don’t need—’
‘Don’t youdaretry and tell me what I need,’ she warned him, cold rage ringing from every word. ‘Give me that envelope or so help me I will come over there and take it from you.’
He handed it to her. She held it between a quaking fingertip and thumb, the way she’d have handled a dirty tissue.
‘What will I find out if I open it? What does it say?’
‘Rosie,please—’ James begged. His eyes were alight with alarm.
Realising she didn’t need him to respond, she said: ‘You were going to leave me anote. You were planning to move out without saying goodbye – without evenspeakingto me – and let me find a letter when I got home. Afterten years. What the fuck, James?’
