PART 1
I had imagined about a hundred things Julius might say when he finally saw me again.
I missed you. I’m glad to be home. Even just my name, in the voice he used to use for it.
I had practised what I would do with my face.
Instead the first thing my husband said was:
Elowen, we need to separate.
I was standing outside Terminal 4 with a bunch of white lilies, looking at a man I had loved for eleven years.
He looked different. Older, but not in the way you expect after three years. Smoother. Better cut hair. More expensive, somehow, all the way down to his shoes.
But that was not what made my stomach go.
Standing beside him was a much younger woman in a cream coat.
She was holding the hands of two identical little boys.
Twins. Four at the very most.
And then one of them let go of her hand and waved at me.
Just a small wave. The way small children wave at anybody who happens to be looking at them.
And I waved back.
Before I understood one single thing about what was happening, I waved back at him.
I have thought about those two seconds more than about anything else that happened in that terminal.
Then the other one smiled.
Julius’s eyes. Julius’s crooked smile, the one that goes up on the left and that I have loved since I was twenty-seven.
I said: who are they?
And he sighed. As though the question was already tiring.
He said: this is Annika.
She gave me a small, uncomfortable smile, and I have thought about that too, because there was something in it that was not smugness.
He said: and these are Jonas and Mattis.
I said: you have children?
His eyes went round the terminal, checking who was near. He said: Elowen, not here.
I nearly laughed.
Not here.
For three years I had defended that man to everybody who asked why a two-year fellowship kept getting extended.
I kept our house. I paid the insurance on both cars, one of which has been in a garage since 2022.
I took his mother to every single one of her appointments. Every month, for three years, forty minutes each way.
I transferred money every time he told me his research stipend had been delayed.
And in the March of 2024 I refinanced our house, because he rang me on a Sunday and said the funding situation out there had become difficult and he needed help.
And now he was standing in front of me with another woman and two children.
She stepped closer to him and he put his arm round her.
That hurt more than the twins did, and I still do not entirely understand why.
He said: our marriage has been finished for a long time. You’re the only one who refused to accept it.
I said: you rang me every Sunday.
He said: habit.
I said: you told me you loved me. In January. On the phone.
And his face did not change at all. Not by anything.
He said: I didn’t want unnecessary drama while I was working.
Then she spoke, for the first time.
She said: Julius told me you were basically divorced.
I looked at her. And then at him.
I said: basically?
His jaw went tight. He said: don’t make this ugly.
And something in me went completely still. Not calm exactly. Still.
PART 2
I walked over to the bin by the barrier and put the lilies on top of it. They were nineteen pounds and I had chosen them on the Thursday.
Then I took off my wedding ring.
It came off easily, which it would not have done three years ago.
He watched me do it, and when I put it into his open palm, I saw relief go straight across his face.
He thought I had given up. He thought it was going to be simple.
I said: okay.
His eyebrows went up. He said: that’s it?
I said: that’s it.
And I turned and started walking towards the car park.
He said my name.
And there was something different in his voice now. Careful. A man checking a figure.
He said: we’ll discuss the house tomorrow. I’m entitled to my share.
Then he glanced at her and the boys and said: they need somewhere stable while we get settled.
There were about twenty people standing round us by then, in the way people do at airports when something is happening.
He took hold of my wrist and said it loud enough for every single one of them:
We’ll discuss the house tomorrow. I’m entitled to my share.
Nobody moved. A man by the barrier put a suitcase down flat.
He did not let go. He leaned in and said:
Tomorrow, Elowen. Well?
And for the first time since he came through those doors, I smiled.
It was not a happy smile. He noticed. He always notices.
He said: what?
I said: nothing.
Because he thought the house was the most valuable thing with my name on it.
He had been away for three years and he had not asked me one question about my work in any of them.
I counted, afterwards, because I have every one of those Sunday calls logged on an old phone.
A hundred and fifty-one calls. Average length eleven minutes.
He asked about his mother in about forty of them. He asked about the car in twelve. He asked about the boiler more times than he asked about me.
The last time Julius Frayne asked me a question about my own life was the fourth of June 2022, when he asked whether I was still doing that course.
I was not. I had stopped it in the April because the timetable clashed with his mother’s appointments, and I had told him that at the time, and he had said that’s a shame, love, and we had moved on to the car.
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