After a mercifully short and sweet six-hour shift at Cover 4 U, Rosie snapped shut her laptop and felt an unexpected surge of Friday feeling as she prepared to head home.
She’d been supposed to go for a drink with Ellie, but the plan had been rain-checked because her seven-year-old son, Finn, had a temperature. While sympathising with her friend, Rosie found herself thinking that she couldn’t remember the last time she and James had had a proper night out. The golden September sunshine filled her with confidence that she could drag her health-conscious boyfriend to a pub garden, and maybe even beyond. It felt like exactly what they needed. When Rosie walked into the flat about forty minutes later, wondering if she could get away with displaying her slightly stubbly calves in an old faithful midi dress, she was immediately greeted by the tinny sound of computer game gunfire and realised James must be home.
She had expected to have plenty of time to freshen up and message him about where they should go – teasing him about the detoxing opportunity an old-school Friday night would present. Recently, he either worked late or did long sessions at the gym on Friday evenings. Perhaps, Rosie mused, the unseasonably warm weather had squashed any urge to remain virtuous, and she’d find him more amenable to her plan than she’d thought.
Her surprise at his presence quickly gave way to an appreciation that she could be sipping something cold and delicious in the evening sunshine in under half an hour. She burst into the sitting room, where he was perched on the edge of the sofa, ready to cajole him into action. He was hunched over the PlayStation controller, his narrowed gaze fixed on a Nazi zombie he was trying to kill. Vaguely, Rosie wondered if you could kill a reanimated corpse – and if not, what the point of this computer game purported to be.
As she dropped her handbag onto the couch, James turned to face her, startled. Evidently, engrossed in his virtual mission, he hadn’t heard her open the front door or enter the room. ‘What are you doing home?’ he asked, in a strangled sort of voice. ‘I … I thought you had plans with Ellie.’
‘I did,’ Rosie said, tempted to jokily ask whether he had another woman hidden behind the sofa. ‘Finn’s sick,’ she explained. ‘We decided to do it another time. I was thinking we could go out, just us? It’s a gorgeous night.’
‘Ah,’ James said, releasing a deep breath. He turned back to look at the TV. The words GAME OVER were writ large across the screen. With a clatter, he set down his controller on the walnut coffee table. The noise seemed to slice through the charged silence in the room.
Rosie suddenly got the distinct sense that he’d had important plans her unexpected arrival had disrupted. Her heart began to thump wildly. Could this be it …? Had James devised some scheme to set up a romantic scene in the flat, then propose to her when she arrived home later this evening?
Rosie cast her eyes around for evidence: candles, flowers, chocolates, ice-cold champagne. Her eyes snagged on his massive gym bag, abandoned on the floor next to the flatscreen, but aside from that she could find nothing – which perhaps explained his alarm at her sudden appearance.
The quiet between them stretched on, becoming taut. Rosie’s whole body thrummed with anticipation. She noticed a muscle working in James’s clean-shaven jaw and saw the high, rigid set of his shoulders. He was definitely nervous. She suppressed a smile as she remembered Brendan’s proposal to Niamh … perhaps a little encouragement wouldn’t go amiss.
‘James …?’ Rosie said, her voice soft and reassuring. ‘Is everything OK? Is there something you wanted to talk about?’
Relief flooded his features, though his face remained pale and clammy. He looked almost shaken – like he was willing himself not to panic.
‘It’s all right,’ Rosie murmured, sinking down next to him on the sofa and slipping her hand into his. ‘You can talk to me.’ His hesitancy was charming, she thought – a sign that, while he wasn’t the most proactive of partners, he didn’t take her for granted in the way she occasionally worried he might.
James sighed and she saw a tiny drop of sweat drift past his temple, then disappear into the dark-blond hair above his ear. His blue eyes were darting around the room, like he was scanning for an escape route.
‘I … I do need to talk to you,’ James finally mumbled, focusing intently on a wood knot in one of the floorboards.
‘I’m listening,’ Rosie said, smiling at him and squeezing his hand.
James took a huge breath, then looked up at her, his sand-coloured eyebrows high in his forehead. His eyes were wide, now: round with apprehension.
He opened his mouth to speak and Rosie’s stomach rolled over.
This was it. The start of the rest of her life. The moment she’d remember forever.
‘It’s … it’s us,’ James eventually managed. ‘You and me.’
Rosie nodded gently, making it clear he should go on. She felt almost sick with excitement.
‘I can’t …’ James faltered. ‘I can’t do this – us – anymore.’
The words Yes! Of course I’ll marry you! stuck in Rosie’s throat a second before she uttered them.
She froze in shock, as if a jet of cold water had hit her full in the face.
James had robbed Rosie of the power to speak, to think, leaving her able only to gape at him in horror. She couldn’t make sense of what he’d just said – the words she thought she’d just heard.
‘Er … what?’ she said, after what felt like an eternity.
James pulled his sweaty hand away from hers, and she felt as if he’d slapped her.
‘Fuck,’ he groaned, clawing at his hair in despair. ‘I just … I can’t do this.’
He flapped his hands, gesturing at the space between them, the room they sat in and, obliquely, their relationship.
Something inside Rosie begged her not to set off the bomb that was primed to detonate. She knew that the thing James was steeling himself to say couldn’t be unheard once spoken aloud, any more than a lobbed grenade could be unexploded after blowing up a building. Nevertheless, her need to understand what was happening squashed the urge not to ask.
‘Tell me what you mean, James. Say it with words. I don’t get it,’ Rosie cried, and her eyes began to swim with tears as the lie left her lips.
She might have quit university after only a term, but she was plenty smart enough to know where this discussion was heading – even if she didn’t want to think it possible. In recent weeks, she’d convinced herself James’s nervous behaviour might mean marriage was imminent. Now, his edginess made a different sort of sense. She cringed at her own stupidity.
‘I just feel like we’re not good together anymore,’ James murmured, his ashen face desperate and pleading.
Rosie had seen enough break-ups in soaps and TV dramas to understand how this was supposed to go. There should be shouting. Swearing. Maybe some smashing of china or glassware thrown into the mix.
As it was, she felt too winded to scream or get violent with James. She was numb, immobile, incredulous – even though there was no reason to doubt that he meant what he was saying.
‘So, what? You’re unhappy?’ Rosie asked, feeling tears rolling down her face.
‘Not unhappy,’ James said in a rush. ‘Just … not ready. You know I’ve made a lot of changes lately. I realised I wasn’t living my best life – that there might be more out there for me, and that I didn’t have to … plod on with things as they were.’
The words were a volley of punches to Rosie’s gut.
‘Plod on? Not ready?’ she repeated. ‘We’ve been together almost ten years, James. Am I supposed to believe you felt ready after five years, or seven, but not now? It makes no sense.’
‘I don’t want to settle down,’ he said.
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 me why. And I need to know. Help me make sense of all this.’ She felt the words I thought you were about to ask me to marry you dancing 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 have everything in 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.’
You don’t focus 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.
‘So I’m the 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’re content. 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 – you don’t want.’
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 you dare try 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 a note. You were planning to move out without saying goodbye – without even speaking to me – and let me find a letter when I got home. After ten years. What the fuck, James?’
Shivering with hurt and shock, and seized by a strange urge to laugh hysterically at how crazy this all was, she glared at him. James hung his head but said nothing, silenced by Rosie’s unflinching – and entirely accurate – assessment of his intentions.
‘So, where are you going to stay?’ she asked, nodding in the direction of his bag.
‘With a friend from the gym. Nobody you know. Just for a week or two, probably, while I sort myself out.’
This brief mention of practicalities seemed to pull James from a stupor. He stood up, then shuffled awkwardly from foot to foot like he was waiting for permission to leave. How very like him, Rosie thought: even now, he needed her to be the one who took action – dealt the final blow.
‘Nobody I know,’ she parroted. ‘I’m not sure I even know you anymore, James. How could you do this? I mean, who are you?’
‘I’m still me,’ he said, in a quiet voice that, to Rosie’s ears, sounded far sorrier for itself than it had any right to.
‘You’re not,’ she informed him. ‘Yes, the James I knew always tried to avoid confrontation, but this … it’s pathetic. Cowardly. More than that, it’s cruel. I’d never have believed you capable of it.’
Still he stood there, staring at his feet like a naughty child facing dismissal from the head teacher’s office. Rosie noticed he was already wearing trainers, ready to make his getaway.
As he glanced at the fitness watch on his wrist, Rosie couldn’t resist spitting: ‘Waiting for something, are you? Got somewhere urgent to be?’ Her voice was so hard it sounded strange to her own ears. James flushed scarlet.
‘I … oh god, I don’t know,’ James answered. ‘Er … I suppose there were things I wanted – needed – to tell you. I didn’t want to end it like this.’
Something like pride flamed inside Rosie then: a powerful, self-preserving urge to take back some agency in a situation that had totally blindsided her. She wiped her face free of tears with her fingertips and willed herself not to cry anymore.
‘I’m sure there’s nothing you need to say that isn’t written in your letter,’ she quipped. He flinched at her sarcasm.
‘Seriously, don’t let me keep you,’ she went on. She gestured for him to follow her towards the flat door.
‘Don’t forget your bag.’ She pointed at it, all too aware that it would be standard James behaviour to leave it behind, then have to come back for it later.
She marched up the corridor and he moped after her so pathetically that an unversed onlooker might have believed Rosie had dumped him, rather than the other way around.
As Rosie reached for the latch on the door so she could open it and hustle him out, the buzzer sounded. There was someone at the main entrance of the building, wanting to be let in.
‘Who on earth is that?’ Rosie demanded.
James bit his bottom lip, but said nothing.
She picked up the old plastic intercom and said, ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Ali here. I have your pizza,’ explained the person on the other end of the line.
‘My what?’
‘Your pizza,’ Ali repeated, audibly annoyed by her slowness. ‘Sides, too. And dips.’
‘Fine,’ Rosie said, and pressed the button that would open the outside door for him. Then she turned and fixed a steely glare on James.
‘Please correct me if I’ve got any of this wrong. You came home early from work so you could play Kill the Nazi Zombies—’
‘Call of Duty,’ James put in, without thinking. Rosie stared daggers at him and he said, ‘Sorry,’ under his breath.
‘You wanted to play Kill the Nazi Zombies for a bit,’ Rosie ploughed on, ‘because you knew you wouldn’t fit your PlayStation into the overnight bag you’ve packed SO YOU CAN LEAVE ME. You’re sadder about saying a short-term goodbye to your games console than you are about the end of our relationship – which you intended to finish by leaving me a letter, like we’re in Year Nine and you’ve decided you don’t want to snog me behind the bike sheds anymore.’
James looked at her almost imploringly. He didn’t want to be the bad guy, Rosie realised – or at least, not this bad a guy.
Too fucking late, she thought.
There was a knock at the door.
Rosie opened it and Ali, their Domino’s delivery driver, handed her a large box upon which several smaller ones were stacked. She took them from him, checked they’d been paid for and thanked him.
‘And perhaps worst of all,’ she said, turning back to James after the door had closed again, ‘you ordered pizza to eat while you played your games. PIZZA. With actual DOUGH. For fuck’s sake, how many of those cauliflower-based abominations have I suffered through while you’ve been committed to eating less gluten?’
‘I … I know it’s bad,’ James mumbled, his face flaming. ‘I think I ordered it so I could stress-eat.’
Rosie felt her face tighten into what she hoped was the most withering look she’d ever given anyone. ‘Oh, I’m sure dumping me by letter after a few rounds of your favourite shoot-’em-up adventure would have been super stressful,’ she said, derision dripping from every word.
James heaved his bag off the floor. Leaving a healthy gap between them, Rosie reopened the flat door and stood aside for him. Head bent low, he slunk through it almost as though he was trying not to be noticed.
Before she could shut the door behind him, James turned. There was something like hope in his eyes, and it made Rosie’s blood boil. Instinct, plus a decade’s worth of experience, told her he was perilously close to suggesting that, after a little time, they could still be in each other’s lives platonically.
‘Don’t tell me we can get over this, James,’ she said. ‘We can’t. If you go now, there’s no coming back – not even as friends.’ She knew she meant it, even though everything she’d hoped for – her vision of the life she thought they’d live together – was caving in on itself like a dying star.
Then she noticed that James’s eyes were fixed on the hot, slightly soggy takeaway boxes she was still clutching.
‘Oh my god,’ Rosie breathed. ‘You weren’t going to say we could stay close. You were going to ask if you could take your pizza with you.’
James recoiled as Rosie advanced towards the open doorway. Finally overcome with shame, he shifted his gaze to the floor at the same time as he raised his hands, ready to receive the long-forbidden contraband carbs he’d ordered. It made Rosie think of a Catholic churchgoer awaiting communion.
She took a long, hard look at him and wondered how she could have got so much so wrong. She’d put this man on a pedestal at the centre of her life – yet he’d been prepared to walk out of it without doing her the basic courtesy of telling her, to her face, that their relationship was over.
‘Goodbye, James,’ she said, praying that every scrap of the contempt she felt for him at that moment was clear in those two icy words. He backed away in shock.
Allowing herself one last look at him, Rosie nudged the flat door towards its frame. ‘Thanks for dinner, by the way!’ she called, as it clicked decisively into place.