The text said I think we should stop this.
That was the first one. The second came eleven seconds later, which I know because my phone timestamps things and because I counted afterward, more than once. It said I've been thinking about it for a while and I think it's the right thing. No punctuation on either. No question mark, no full stop, nothing to say he'd finished a thought or was waiting on me. Just two grey bubbles sitting there like they'd always been there.
I was in the stockroom. I had a clipboard in my hand with an inventory sheet I'd been filling out wrong all morning, writing quantities in the description column. The fluorescent tube above me had this thing it did where it buzzed and went dim for about two seconds before catching again. It had been doing it for weeks and nobody had fixed it because nobody ever fixes anything in a stockroom. It buzzed. It dimmed. It came back. I read the messages again.
I think we should stop this.
I read them a third time with my back against the metal shelving, the corner of a box of greeting cards digging into my shoulder blade. I remember thinking the word stop was strange. Not end. Not break up. Stop. Like we were a tap he was turning off.
My manager Bev asked if I was alright about twenty minutes later, because I was still standing there, and I said my stomach was off, and she said go sit in the break room, and I did. I sat with my phone face up on the table next to a microwave that smelled like somebody's curry from three days ago, and I typed are you serious? Deleted it. Typed what do you mean? Deleted that too, because it was obvious what he meant. He meant stop.
I sent back okay.
I don't know why I sent okay. I think about this more than any of it. Not the two and a half years. Not the first time he said he loved me or the last time he kissed me or any of the things you're supposed to fixate on. I fixate on okay. One word. Five letters. Lowercase. No full stop. Like I was confirming a delivery slot.
He didn't reply to that. There was nothing to reply to, I suppose.
That was May 31st, 2016. Day one.
I met Dean on September 17th, 2013, a date I'd love to forget but which my brain has filed under permanent storage along with my National Insurance number and the words to every song I loved when I was fourteen. He came into the shop on a Wednesday. I was on the till and it was dead, properly dead, the kind of afternoon where you rearrange the display by the door three times just to feel like you've done something. He walked in and I noticed him because he was the first customer in forty minutes and because he smelled like clean laundry and that body spray, the stuff teenage boys drown themselves in, except on him it was faint enough to almost be accidental.
He leaned on the counter. He asked me something. I genuinely cannot remember what. Something about a product. Something that didn't matter. What I remember is that his voice had a crack in it, like he was getting over a cold, and the counter was pressing into my hip on my side and I shifted my weight and didn't move away from it.
He came back the next Wednesday. And the one after that. By the fourth Wednesday I was checking my hair in the staff toilet mirror at one o'clock because that's around when he'd show up. I was twenty-two and acting like I was fifteen and I didn't care. He remembered my name by the second visit, and by the third he was asking me things that had nothing to do with anything we sold.
The first time he brought me flowers they were red roses from the petrol station. I know they were from the petrol station because the yellow price sticker was still on the cellophane, £4.99, and he hadn't noticed, or had and didn't care. He put them on the counter and said these are for you, and his voice still had that crack in it even though it had been weeks and he couldn't still have been ill. That was just his voice. That was just how he sounded.
I kept those roses until they went brown and crisp and Bev told me they were depressing the customers.
There are things I could tell you about the next two and a half years that would make sense of it. The way he kissed my forehead more than my mouth, like he was checking I was real. The way he talked about the flat we'd get. Not might get. Would get. He said it the way you'd say we'll have dinner tonight, like it was already booked. Big windows, Cara, the kind you can sit in. He said that more than once. He described the light that would come through them. He used the word we like it was structural, like if you pulled it out the sentence would fall in on itself.
I believed him because I'm stupid and because he was convincing and because when someone tells you something every day for two years your brain starts filing it as fact.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, or behind myself. Time doesn't work properly anymore. It hasn't since May.
Day three I went back to work. My mum offered to ring Bev and sort it. Take the week, she said, just take the week. I said no, because I meant yes and I was terrified of sitting still. If I sat still I'd have to look at those two messages and understand them as real things that had happened, and I wasn't ready for that. Not ready the way you're not ready to look straight at the sun. You know it's up there. You can feel the heat of it on your face. You just can't turn toward it yet.
So I went to work and stood behind the till and the fluorescent tube in the stockroom buzzed on its two-second delay and I flinched. Only slightly. A catch in the shoulders. But I felt it in my teeth.
Week one was nothing. I mean that literally. I felt nothing. I sent him two texts, both reasonable, both measured. One said can we talk about this? The other said I just want to understand. He didn't reply to either. I checked my phone every four minutes. I know it was four minutes because I started timing myself and then I couldn't stop timing myself and then that became its own problem.
Week two I cried in the shower, which is such a cliché I was almost annoyed at myself for doing it. The water was too hot and I didn't adjust it and I stood there until my skin went red and thought about all the stupid things you think about. The smell of his coat. The sound of his car pulling up outside, that rattle in the exhaust. The exact pressure of his hand on the small of my back when we walked anywhere. They arrived whole and in order, like they'd been queuing.
Week three I started drinking.
I want to be clear about something. I wasn't a drinker before Dean left. Out with friends on a Friday, a few, nothing remarkable. Week three I was drinking on Tuesdays. Drinking alone in my flat with the lights off, watching programmes I couldn't follow, and then drinking out, with people, louder than I'd ever been in my life, and the two versions were doing different jobs. Alone was anaesthetic. With people was something worse.
The bathroom floor night happened on a Thursday. I'd been out with Jade and her boyfriend's mates and I'd drunk enough that the walk home only exists in fragments. Keys in the door. One shoe coming off in the hallway, the other staying on. Sitting on the bathroom floor with the cold tile against the backs of my legs and my phone in my hand, scrolling back through old messages from Dean. I was looking for something specific. I don't know what. Some proof. Some evidence it had been real.
I found the one about the windows. He'd sent it at 11pm on a night I can't place anymore, a normal night, probably a weeknight, and it said big windows Cara the kind you can sit in, and I'd replied with the heart eyes emoji and he'd sent back I mean it and then a string of messages about the kitchen he wanted and the neighbourhood he'd been looking at online and whether I preferred gas or electric hobs.
Gas. I said gas. We had a whole conversation about hobs. About hobs.
I sent him a message. I don't remember doing it. I know I did because the next morning, when I woke up on the bathroom floor with the tile pattern printed on my cheek and my one shoe still on, I opened my phone and saw the blue bubble of my own words sitting under months of silence.
you said big windows
Three words. Lowercase. No punctuation. Sent at 2:47am, according to the phone, which timestamps everything.
He didn't reply to that either.
Day twenty-two I was in Tesco getting milk and washing tablets and those little yoghurts I like that come in packs of six, the raspberry ones, and I walked past the body care aisle and the smell hit me like a wall. That specific cheap sweet chemical smell. I stopped walking. My hand was still on the yoghurts in the basket and I just stopped, right there between the shampoo and the shower gel, and it was so sudden and so physical that a woman behind me asked if I was alright. I said yes and left the shop. I left the basket on the floor. The yoghurts, the milk, all of it. I sat in my car in the car park for twelve minutes with the engine off.
Day twenty-four. Jade sent me a Snapchat from the night before that I had no memory of being in. In it I'm standing in someone's kitchen holding a red cup like I'm at an American house party, and I'm laughing. Not just laughing. The kind where your mouth is open too wide and your eyes aren't tracking anything and you look like a person doing an impression of a person having fun. I watched it in bed with the volume barely on and my own laugh came through the speaker tinny and thin and I didn't recognise it. I watched it twice, deleted it, and lay there looking at the ceiling for a while.
His faults, then. Dean loaded the dishwasher like a man who'd never seen one, plates at random angles, cups right side up collecting grey water. He said supposably instead of supposedly and never once accepted correction. He was late to everything — he'd say five minutes and mean thirty. He ate cereal at 11pm and left the bowl on the bedside table, and in the morning there'd be a ring of dried milk round the inside like a tidemark in a bath. He could never remember my mum's name. Called her Janine sometimes, Janet once. It's Jeanette. Three times I corrected him. Three times.
He pressed his forehead against mine on a Tuesday morning. We were in bed and nothing was happening. No occasion. No reason. Just a Tuesday. Just the pressure of his skin on mine and the sound of his breathing, which was slow.
By Day forty-seven I had a system. Three answers for how are you. Good, busy. Oh, you know, keeping on. Better every day. I rotated them. Monday's coworker got the first. The friend I saw on Wednesday got the second. Bev got the third because Bev watched me closest and better every day implied trajectory, implied an arrow pointing somewhere other than down.
Nobody heard the same answer twice in one week. I was careful about that. I planned it out like a rota and kept track in my head. I smiled when I said them and the smile was technically accurate. Mouth curved. Teeth visible. Eyes doing the thing eyes are supposed to do. I'd practised in the bathroom mirror. Not because I'm crazy. Because I'm thorough.
The kitchen table was a Sunday. Mum's house. The mug she gave me had a faded rooster on it, one of those mugs that's been in a family kitchen since before you were born and nobody remembers where it came from. The tea was hot when she put it down. I wrapped both hands round it because it gave them something to do.
"You eating alright?" she asked.
"Yeah."
"You look thin."
"I've always been thin."
She sat down across from me with her own mug. She'd made us both tea neither of us was going to drink.
"I'm fine," I said. "I'm good, actually. Keeping busy. Work's been mental and Jade and I went out last weekend and it was really nice, it was good, we went to that new place on"
"Cara."
"What."
She didn't answer. She was looking at my hands on the mug. My left hand. I looked down and it was trembling against the ceramic, a visible vibration I could feel travelling up through my wrist into my arm, and the tea was making tiny concentric ripples.
I hadn't sipped it. Hadn't even noticed it warming my palms. It was just a thing to hold.
"I'm fine," I said again.
Mum reached across the table and put her hand flat over my shaking one. She didn't say a word. She just held it there, pressing down, the weight of her palm steadying mine against the rooster. The trembling didn't stop but it had nowhere left to go.
I opened my mouth to finish the sentence about the new place on whatever street and what came out wasn't a word. Not crying, not yet. The noise that comes before it. A sentence coming apart in my throat.
She didn't move her hand. She just kept it there.
I have a message saved in my Notes app. I wrote it on Day sixty-something, edited it on Day seventy-four, edited it again on Day eighty-one. It says Did you mean it when you talked about the windows. That's all. Ten words. I've rewritten it maybe thirty times and it always comes back to those ten, because they're the only ones that matter.
Day one hundred. September 7th, 2016.
I woke up and reached for my phone before my eyes were open. Same gesture. Same arm extending to the bedside table, same thumb finding the screen, same half second where the brightness hurts and I'm squinting at the notifications. Looking for a name. The name isn't there. It hasn't been for a hundred days and it won't be tomorrow and I know this the way I know every fact I've ever memorised, and knowing doesn't change the reach.
I put the phone face down on the mattress.
His contact is still in my phone. The message in my Notes app is still there too, unsent. I haven't deleted either. It sits between a shopping list and a reminder to book the dentist. Ten words I can't send and can't get rid of.
I got up. I made coffee. The kettle took too long because it always takes too long and I stood there waiting with my hip against the counter, and I thought about him, and then I thought about the fact that I was thinking about him, and then I poured the water and got the milk out and the milk was nearly gone so I'd have to go to Tesco later, which meant walking past that aisle or going the long way round through frozen foods.
I poured the coffee. I drank it standing up. Outside, a car alarm went off on the next street and stopped after ten seconds. I put my mug in the sink and ran the water over it. The water was cold because I hadn't turned the hot tap and I didn't bother to
