The Last Time I Called You Home

We kept the lease six weeks longer than the marriage.

It sounds careless when I say it like that, but it was the opposite of careless. It was arithmetic. Two names on a document, one deposit we could not afford to lose, and a landlord who did not care which of us slept where. So we stayed. You took the bedroom. I took the sofa and the side of the fridge with the yoghurt.

I learned the flat by the sound of you not being in it. The kettle at 6:40 that was no longer for two cups. The wardrobe door that stopped sticking once half the weight came off the rail. The particular silence of a bathroom where someone has taken their toothbrush but left the glass.

On the last morning you asked if I still called it home. Force of habit, I said. I'm going home, to a colleague. Left it at home, about my charger. You nodded like I had confirmed something you already suspected.

We carried the bookshelf down together because it would not fit in the lift. Four flights, you walking backwards, me telling you when the corners came. At the bottom we set it on the pavement and neither of us had a free hand, so we just looked at it.

"You take the novels," you said. "You actually read them."

I took the novels. You took the cookbooks we never opened and the atlas we bought the week we got engaged, when we still thought the next few years were a place you could point to on a map.

The word went slowly, the way a bruise does. For a month I still said it by accident. Then one evening I said my flat to the man at the off-licence, and it came out clean, no snag, and I stood on the street with my one bag of shopping feeling like I had passed a test I never wanted to sit.