I have been quietly unbearable about it ever since.
I check the bedroom and change the pillowcases because we have fallen into a rhythm where she pretends this is luxurious and then sleeps better when I do it anyway.
Then I sit at her tiny kitchen table and take the property brochure out of my jacket.
The cottage looks harmless on paper.
That is how they get you.
A stone-fronted little thing with low windows, a blue-grey door and a roof that probably requires attentionsooner than I would like. The kitchen is ridiculous. The garden is not so much a garden as an outdoor question. The second bedroom would fit a desk, bookshelves and the more optimistic part of my career.
But I can see it.
That is the dangerous thing.
I can see my laptop on the desk in the spare room. Pippa’s boots by the back door. Her uniform drying on the rack. My running shoes in the hall, muddy enough to make her sigh. Amanda and Nour coming over with wine. Jamie and Samantha in the garden, complaining it is too small and then immediately finding seven ways to turn it into a battleground.
I can see Pippa coming home after nights and not having to drive anywhere.
I can see making her coffee in a kitchen too small for both of us, which means she would have to stand too close.
I can see us.
Not as a fantasy.
As a life.
That is what terrifies me.
Because for years, I thought wanting more meant looking away from wherever I was. The next byline. The next city. The next room where I might become someone impressive enough that nobody could dismiss me as noise.
But now, wanting more looks like a cottage with questionable tiles and a woman who will absolutely have opinions about where the mugs go.
At some point, I sleep.
Not much. Enough to wake stiff-necked on the sofa at six-twenty, with the property brochure on my chest and the horrible realisation that I have become the kind ofman who sleeps under a striped blanket waiting for his girlfriend to come home from a night shift.
There are worse things to become.
I shower quickly, then make breakfast.
Nothing dramatic. Bacon rolls because she will deny being hungry until she smells them. Coffee strong enough to qualify as a structural material. A bowl of cut fruit because Amanda once told me Pippa forgets vitamins exist when she is tired, and I have retained this information with the seriousness of a man collecting intelligence.
At twenty to eight, my phone rings.
Pippa.
I answer before the second ring.
“Tell me the Fellsiders behaved themselves.”
“Mostly,” she says. Her voice is low, tired and warmer than she would probably admit. “One alarm, one drunk man who thought a wheelie bin was on fire. It wasn’t.”
I smile and turn down the heat under the bacon. “Are you on your way?”
“Leaving in ten.”
“Food will be ready.”
