June 2024

First Prize

But She's A Flame, Jay McKenzie, Republic of Korea

 
Second Prize

Gravity, Jaime Gill, Cambodia

The thee stories will soon be added below! Enjoy!

Third Prize

Not Normal, Judy Walker, Stockport, UK

 

The June 2024 Shortlist

Property Rights, Abigail Williams, Totnes, UK

Distant Voices, Ros Levenson, London, UK

Lest We Forget, J.S. Savage, London, UK

But She's A Flame, Jay McKenzie, Republic of Korea

Gravity, Jaime Gill, Cambodia

Not Normal, Judy Walker, Stockport, UK

Fermenting, Anne Rabbitt, London, UK

 

 

The June 2024 Longlist

But She's A Flame, Jay McKenzie, Republic of Korea

Distant Voices, Ros Levenson, London, UK

Fermenting, Anne Rabbitt, London, UK

Gravity, Jaime Gill, Cambodia

Lest We Forget, J.S. Savage, London, UK

My Baby, My Little Blonde Baby, Marcin Ostasz, Spain

Not Normal, Judy Walker, Stockport, UK

Property Rights, Abigail Williams, Totnes, UK

Recipe For a Breathless Date, Taria Karillion, Chester, UK

Revelations,Yvonne Birch, Peterborough, UK

Soldier Doll by Rob Molan, Edinburgh, UK

Torn Between the Lilies, Lynne Bushell, Cavendish, Suffolk, UK

 

 

But She's A Flame by Jay Mackenzie

 

While I was licking Gisella’s neck with a whisky-scorched tongue, down the hill, a woman was burning. She sat in a chair in front of the TV while hungry orange flames and acrid smoke devoured her. What they’re not saying (but everyone knows) is that it was the husband. Husband on paper, ex-husband in heart and bone and mind. The neighbour saw him sharking around for weeks before and is only too happy to regale stories of  macabre blue and white disco lights pounding the night air in the weeks running up to New Year’s Eve.

 

We’re fugged and hornet-mad in the morning from the booze and the noise and the plummeting realisation that this year will be the same as the last or worse. Gisella wants to start by getting down there to have a look: I accuse her of grief-tourism and we have our first fight of the year before the ink has even dried on the opening headlines.

 

A salt-wind musses the venom from our hair and our argument as we wind down the hill.

 

I just want to pay my respects, you know? she says.

 

Someone I recognise from the party is also paying his respects by vomiting in the gutter outside the deceased’s house.

 

Fuckin’ hell, mutters Gisella.

 

A fence has been erected around the charred husk of the house, and I find myself wondering whether the firies or cops brought their own barrier or had to call some poor-fuck fencing contractor from the arms of a lover or dancing on a table in the lost hours to fence off a burnt house. Police are still there, and a fire engine, though the remains of the house emit a little more than a wet smoulder into the mist. A dark whimper all that’s left of a life.

 

It was me what called them, a middle aged woman in slippers tells an assembled group of sticky beaks. I said, he’s been here and he’s going to do something bad, but would they listen?

 

A nearby cop shakes his head, mouths something.

 

We stand side-by-side for a few minutes, inhaling the char.

 

Who even was she? I ask.

 

What? Because you don’t know her, so her death isn’t important? Gisella’s eyes are blazing and I wonder again where she’s been storing this righteous anger for the past year.

 

I force myself to gaze into the fathomless reds of her eyes. No. I mean in general, like who was she? Like what was her name and stuff? Did she like popcorn? Why was she home alone on New Year's Eve?

 

****

           

It wasn’t a New Year’s Eve party where I met Gisella: it was a party designed to stave off the misery of January and the bitter disappointment that set in when the freshly minted gym memberships had already found themselves relegated behind the Zaraffas loyalty card and a receipt for paracetamol. Friend of someone’s sister who said Anna, meet Gisella. Everyone’s been saying you two should meet.

 

All night, I stared at her bird-bone wrists and the mechanics of her knuckles rolling cigarette after cigarette, pinching them between fingers that tapered like pale thin candles.

 

We’re not so different, you and me, she said and I scrunched my face all tight because of my freshly pressed shirt and my neat bob. She was Medusa curls and six-months-backpacking-round-Thailand chic. No seriously, she said. We both want to see and feel and be.

 

I did want to see and feel and be - do want to see and feel and be - but sometimes the thinking gets in the way. When we discuss things - and Gisella never tires of discussing IMPORTANT THINGS - I bring logic. Gisella argues with her heart and teeth. I crave a small mortgage on a neat house: Gisella wants to dip her toes in mountain streams.

 

****

 

She wants to go to the funeral, as I knew she would.

But we didn’t know her, Gis, I say. Why would we go to her funeral?

Don’t you get it? It’s not about knowing her. It’s about sisterhood, standing strong in the face of toxic masculinity.

They haven’t charged him, I say.

She folds her arms over her chest, foot tapping a tattoo on the concrete. Your internalised misogyny is showing there, she says.

Facts, I want to yell. How can facts be misogyny? But I don’t say it because she’s been agitated since New Year and I’m sucked in the lethargy of a month dragged on too long.

The other thing I want to say but don’t is that the funeral is on our first anniversary.

 

****

 

Funeral etiquette where I’m from is steeped in tradition: we drive or march en masse, a sea of obsidian, clean hats, decked in pressed jet, heads dipped, faces flat. The longer we leave our eyes to gather a bulging pool of purple beneath them, the better, but we must remain stoic and dignified.  Wear your grief on your face, but not in the tremors of your body. Too dramatic is frowned upon, unless you’re a child. She did so well, they’ll say if you earn your brownie points by being just the right degree of sad. We must grieve, is the rule, bow and scrape and pander to the lord of death. But not too much that it gets embarrassing.

 

I want mine to be colour and light and dancing, says Gisella. Candles, incense, rose petals scattered. Barefoot and magic. She’s made a nod to her own ideals by wearing a jade silk halterneck under her grey jacket. See, it’s all about how you look at things. Some cultures really celebrate death. We dress up like lobotomised badgers and drag ourselves through mud in iron boots.

 

I have gone traditional: sensible black shoes, a black skirt, black shirt. I am death’s wet dream and as itchy as though my clothes are made of horsehair. We sit at the back amongst people who knew her and people like us.

 

That must be the son, says Gisella, pointing at a tall thin man with the whisper of a goatee clinging to his chin. His head is hunched forwards, curling in on the rest of him like a cooked prawn.

 

Poor bugger, I think. Especially if it was his dad that did it.

 

On the way out of the church, Gisella hugs the boy, though her patchouli embrace does nothing to lighten his deadwood stare. Thank you for coming, he says mechanically. Someone - perhaps an aunt - presses a hand between his shoulder blades. I touch his arm, mumble something, shuffle after Gisella.

 

I just can’t… says Gisella striding on. I mean, how do you go on? Your mother of all people…

 

Some people have more complex relationships with their mothers, Gis, I say and I’m thinking of myself and the uptight, pressed lipped, resentful martyr that brought me up. You disappoint me. As always, she said the last time I saw her.

 

Gisella’s mother brews spiced chai in a metal teapot and has embraced all of Gisella’s lovers as though they had been sent by a higher being to cast light and radiance into their lives. Yeah but still, she says. Then: Let’s get drunk, and she has marched into a sticky looking boozer before I have the chance to respond.

 

Happy anniversary, I mutter, running my fingers across the box in my pocket.

 

****

 

We’re lying in bed and my fingers are still slick with Gisella. Her breath is sour and so is mine. We wear matching indelible purple kisses of  cheap house red.

 

Problem is, she says, that kid’s fucked.

 

She’s slurring a bit. I’d hoped the fumbling, late -afternoon sex would bring her mind back from the boy and the burning woman and back to us and our first anniversary, but she’s stuck there.

 

Gis, I interrupt, happy anniversary.

 

I’m slurring too but it doesn’t matter because the gentle blurring of the edges takes away the sting of Gisella ignoring my bid for a celebration of us. In the pub, she kept talking about how the woman must have felt, what the neighbour saw, the crushing inevitability of a woman slain by her deadbeat ex. Halfway down the second bottle, she wept on the table, and I shushed her, twining her pinging curls between my fingers. I was done with it then, and I’m done with it now.

 

What? she says, frowning.

 

Anniversary, I repeat. One year of you and I. Our union. Our love.  

I think she snorts, but it could have been a cough. She’s got that half-look that could signal either sleep or a party, so I lean off the edge of the bed and hope it's the latter.

 

I love you, I say. Marry me.

 

In my idle musings about this moment, I didn’t picture us drunk and too hot. I didn’t hear my voice as flat as a city puddle, nor Gisella’s crumpled forehead. I didn’t see me opening the ring box the wrong way round, nor the curl of a lip when I presented it properly. I’m not sure what I did picture, but it wasn’t this and as soon as it is out of my mouth, I curse myself for not reading the flags better.

 

The woman I love is slinging limp insults and damp socks at me. She accuses me of craving performative heteronormativity, and I wonder how a woman who couldn’t say reflection earlier can spit the phrase with perfect clarity now.

Forty minutes later and she’s slammed the door and I’m crying into a teacup filled with gin.

 ****

They put the arrest in the papers. It’s on the news too. The dad wasn’t even in town that weekend, it just took them a while to figure that out.

 

Just a quiet fishing weekend, he said. Myall Lakes. He shakes his head and blinks like a startled vole. Too awful.

 

There are pictures of a boy lurching towards adulthood, an innocuous name, a fish eyed mother at his side. School mate of the boy. Had some beef about damage to a car and took a lighter to a pile of deadwood outside the son’s room.

 

I just wanted to frighten him, the boy allegedly wept to the arresting officer.

 

The son holds it together by his father’s side. Now my boy’s got no mum, says the father, and he has to poke a fat dirty thumb into an eye socket. It’s just not fair.

 

I wonder if Gis is watching the same news report, wonder if she’s still filled with the impotent rage against the man, the machine, the mechanics of it all.

 

We haven't seen one another since the row: just two cold texts suggesting, without irony, that we consciously uncouple tell me that she didn’t walk out of my house and into a truck. The friends that suggested we should meet are underwater-quiet.

 

While some other whisky-scorched tongue licks Gisella’s neck, down the hill,  I burn. I sit in a chair in front of the TV while hungry orange flames and the acrid smoke of could-have-beens take me alive.

 

Gravity by Jaime Gill

We were strangers tumbling through our lives on separate trajectories when we crashed into each other in a grimy bar in Luton. It was 1976 and I was in my second year doing physics at the College of Technology. A girl had just broken up with me and I’d spent three days skipping lectures and drowning my sorrows, though I wasn’t sure how sorry I really was. I was alone and he sat down opposite me and grinned, regarding me with bright, dilated eyes across empty pint glasses. He asked if I wanted another, as if asking that question of a man you didn’t know was totally normal. I said no and then I said yes and he laughed.

 

I’d found men attractive before, but buried those thoughts deep inside my brain where all the impossible dreams were interred. The idea of a man was like those huge motorbikes that sometimes roared through the hillside town where I grew up, making my bicycle wobble in their tailwinds. Exciting but dangerous, and not for someone like me. My parents had spent my whole life indoctrinating me with a fear of disasters, both physical and social, and I was not a defiant child. I followed rules, and any rebellions were small and secret.

 

Yet here he was, talking in a way I’d never known anyone speak. He made me think of a radio DJ, his mouth a non-stop torrent of bright, fluid, confident words. By the end of the first hour, I knew all about David’s disappearing Dad and his adoring Mum, his two wildcat sisters and their inappropriate boyfriends, the first men he’d fumbled with age 15 under a railway bridge, about his hopes to be an actor and the TV commercial he’d appeared in. By the end of the second hour he’d prised my own life story out of me, such as it was, dug those impossible dreams out of my head. When he asked me to come to his place for another drink I nodded and followed. If this was disaster it was also life, and the thumping of my heart told me that I did want to live, I really did.

 

For half a year we slowed each other’s velocities. The memories are fragmentary but sharp, like the pieces of a smashed mirror. I remember hungry kissing in a dark pub corner with “Young Americans” squalling from the jukebox. I remember him calling me pretty, how embarrassed I was to be described in a way meant for girls, and how secretly happy. I remember silly scribbled notes, morning drinking, my stupefied love for him. He was carefree and careless. We had the latter in common.

 

One winter morning, I woke in David’s bed, shivering without his warm body to hold onto. He was standing at his window, telling me to get up. I wondered if he’d been awake all night. He took speed at weekends and I mostly stuck to beer, so we often fell asleep at different hours.

 

“What’s the time?” I croaked, a hangover’s tiny hard fists beating on the inside of my skull.

 

“It’s morning time, sunshine. Get up, get up! It snowed last night. We have to go out.”

 

“We absolutely don’t.” I dragged the duvet over my head.

 

“We do. It’ll all melt and turn to mush soon. Come out with me before it’s ruined.”

 

I remembered he’d grown up in southern cities, where snow never settled for long. I was a northern country boy, used to white fields that stayed that way for months.

 

I let him pull me out of bed and drag last night’s t-shirt over my head. We stumbled outside, cold wind whipping my hangover away and making my ears throb. He lost his footing on an ice patch, snatched at my arm, and we both fell, laughing. When we reached the nearest park, his grey blue eyes reflected the sunlit snow. Two nearly perfect red circles had formed on his pale cheeks. I told him he looked like a clown, a handsome clown, and he kissed me. An old man walking his dog nearby muttered in our direction, so we laughed and kissed more. The universe sang.

 

Newton’s law of universal gravity asserts that all matter attracts all matter, with a force varying according to mass and distance. Our attraction was so strong it didn’t even occur to me it could weaken, but then the distance crept between us, inch by inch. I don’t remember exactly how - by then, alcohol was blurring everything – but we fell out of each other’s lives almost by accident, as if helpless against invisible forces. Time sped up and got messier as the distance grew. Time dilation, Einstein calls that. We were both late. All the time, sometimes so late we missed each other altogether. Once I was late enough to find him playing pool with a man I didn’t know, arm slung over his shoulder. I’d heard rumours of other guys. Someone smashed a glass against a wall. He told me I needed help and I knew he wasn’t offering. I don’t remember our last conversation or even where it took place.

 

Somewhere in the chaos, I got kicked out of university. I retreated to my parents’ semi in the Peak District and tried to breathe again in that atmosphere of silent, sour disappointment. I’d drink smuggled beer cans in my childhood bedroom and sometimes join village pub crawls with old schoolfriends. On one binge, I lost my diary. His telephone number was inside, but I didn’t try to track it down. Such concentrated effort was beyond me by then. Months later, a mutual acquaintance told me he’d moved to LA. I remembered him mentioning a cousin who lived there, though the details were smudged. I wanted to feel happy for him, but just felt left behind.

 

I continued falling, gravity’s heavy hands on my ankles. I left my parents for a bar job in Leeds. They watched me leave with sad, relieved eyes.

 

Over the years there were a few women and one other man, but nothing worked so I drank so nothing worked so I drank. I found catering jobs, and even held a couple down for a while. They terminated in uncomfortable conversations in depressing rooms, just like my relationships. The same phrases cropped up, too, about what a nice guy I was underneath everything, and how many chances I’d been given.

 

I racked up three trips to A&E and two arrests over two decades. It says everything about the life and friends I’d chosen that this wasn’t considered excessive in our small, shrinking circle. I never quite buried my dreams again, but they slowly died anyway, and life became a slow, hard swim against tides of disappointment and diminishment.

 

In 1999, my fall ended when I crash-landed into an AA meeting in London. An old, reformed drinking friend took me. I was a shivering, nicotine-yellow ghost by then, but I heard words inside which eventually returned me to life.

 

David’s fall had ended in 1985, in a Chicago hospital ward people were afraid to visit. I learnt this a year into sobriety, once I’d mastered the internet and spent days searching his name. His obituary was short, written 16 years before in a gay magazine I’d never heard of by someone I’d never met. Someone who’d loved him, I hoped. I took an HIV test but wasn’t surprised when it came back negative. It was all so long ago. I might have told my parents I’d avoided that disaster, at least, but they were both dead. I barely remembered either funeral.

 

I try to stay as still as I can now, to live calmly and with care. I go to AA meetings, work in a charity shop, and spend every other weekend fishing with two sobriety friends. It’s a quiet life. A nice life, one I’m grateful for. My parents might finally approve of me. I live slowly as if that might in turn slow time down, having squandered so much of it. It doesn’t work, of course. The years still tumble by, pulling me with them.

 

My memory is ragged and full of holes, a common complaint among us drunks. It’s probably a kindness, overall. “For an addict, happiness is good health and a bad memory,” one of my friends said once while we were fishing.

 

Yet sometimes I see those snow-dazzled eyes as if they were right in front of me, as if I could reach out and touch that beautiful face again. Those few memories I held onto are still vivid, still sharp. I did live, I did.

 

When I let myself think of David, I wish I’d been a more substantial person when we met, possessed greater mass. If I had, maybe I could have held onto him, somehow arrested both our falls. I had dreams for us, dreams I never told him. But dreams are weightless, and gravity pays them no mind. 

 

   

Not Normal by Judy Walker

So, here they were. In Greece. For a holiday, a break, a chance to put things into perspective, a fresh start. Whatever you wanted to call it after your husband has had an affair.

 

He wheeled the cases in from the car. She walked through the living room towards the patio doors, opened them and stepped out. A lovely spot. A glorious view. She sighed and turned back inside. In the kitchen there was a welcome pack on the table - wine, coffee, fruit, baklava. A nice touch.

 

“I’ll take these upstairs, shall I?” He indicated the cases.

 

“Yeah. I’ll come up with you.”

 

Two bedrooms. He hovered between them.

 

“So… do you want…?”

 

“For God’s sake, Ian. We’ll sleep in the same room. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” Her tone was sharp. She often allowed it to be so, now. Just as she allowed her anger to erupt. So much anger. She had never been an angry person, so where did it all come from? When they argued - something else they never used to do - she shouted and screamed, threw things, told him she hated him. She’d never done that before, but then he’d never done what he did before.

 

He was such a different person now. He’d shown her a completely new side to himself - the man who lived high in La La Land, enjoying his exciting new relationship, not giving a moment’s thought to her feelings but still insisting that he loved her, telling her she had nothing to worry about, that it was over. Except, of course, it wasn’t really.

 

They unpacked and settled in. They took a walk to the shop and bought food and more wine. Back at the house she began preparing dinner - just cold stuff with olives and bread.

 

“Would you like a drink?” He held up the bottle of wine. His tone courteous, polite.

 

“Yes, thank you. That would be nice,” she replied, also polite, a little formal.

 

This was not the way a long-time married couple spoke to each other, was it? This was not normal.

Not at all normal. She thought about that a lot. It was what she had told him when it was clear that the ‘relationship' was continuing, because he could see nothing wrong in that - it was now merely platonic. He had conceded it was “unusual”.

 

He brushed against her. “Sorry.”

 

“It’s ok.” She said it automatically, but actually, she thought, it wasn’t ok. She didn’t want him touching her, not now, not any more. That was the lasting damage.

 

Today was their wedding anniversary - their thirty-first. Nothing special to celebrate. Certainly, no cards had been exchanged. No mention of it had been made; unlike last year, their thirtieth anniversary. They’d celebrated with a party. She remembered feeling proud of the landmark, considered it quite an achievement to stay married to the same person for thirty years.

 

“More wine?” He tilted the bottle towards her glass.

 

“No thanks.”

 

His drinking had increased. Not to a worrying level, but definitely too much. If they opened a bottle of wine, she would have a couple of glasses, while he saw off the rest. Then he’d open another bottle or pour himself a whisky, often two. He’d bought a bottle of Metaxa at the duty-free.

 

They sat, watching the sun go down, making conversation as needed. She went to bed before him.

 

In the morning, she woke early, as always, silently picked up her phone, opened his company website and clicked on the ‘our team’ page to stare at the two pictures of her, as she had done every morning, since that day in November when he’d told her. She looked at the brown eyes and the long fair hair, many strands of which she had picked off his clothes in the last few months. She closed the website and cleared her history.

 

They fell into a routine. She would walk to the shop to get stuff for breakfast, which they ate on the terrace. She read her book while he looked at the paper on his phone. That’s what he said he was doing, anyway. Some days they took a stroll into the village for coffee or lunch. In the afternoons, he went for a swim while she stayed at the villa or went for long walks, still trying to get everything straight in her head. In the evenings, they went out to eat, or sometimes she would make a meal. It was all very pleasant, very amicable, civilised. She kept an eye on the mark on his back.

 

****

 

That day in November. She’d come in from work. He was already home.

“Come and sit down for a minute,” he’d said. “I want to talk to you about something.”

 

Her first thought was that it was a health issue, another melanoma. When he told her he’d been having a ‘thing’ - was that how he’d described it? She couldn’t remember now, but she knew he hadn’t called it an affair or a relationship - she was shocked, but not surprised because, she realised, she already knew. He talked about her all the time - a classic tell. He spent a lot of time on his phone in the evenings when they were watching tv.

 

 It had happened gradually. They worked on a couple of projects together, got on well, shared a sense of humour. He was very anxious - too anxious - to assure her that they hadn’t slept together. She knew that was a lie, one of the many that had followed over the previous six months. The last time they had made love - had sex would be a more accurate description - he couldn’t wait to pull away from her. That’s how she knew he’d slept with her, Theresa, her name was. She was, of course, twenty years younger than him.

 

But, he said, he realised it was getting out of hand and so he had ended it. Except he hadn’t really because he wanted to have his cake and eat it. He called it a pre-affair and said he had stopped it before it went too far, whatever that meant. Now they were just back to being friends, colleagues. It was platonic. He kept using that word.

 

The texting continued, increased. Some days she counted thirty texts that he had sent her and she had responded with just as many. He thought he was being discreet but she would catch him with his phone while he was putting the bin out, getting something from the car, pretending it was a work message. His phone went with him everywhere, even the toilet. She had challenged him on this. “It’s convenient to text in the toilet,” he’d said. She had tried to picture the logistics of this, for a man.

 

She saw he’d sent texts to her at midnight after they had gone to bed. Who was this man who could lie and deceive with such ease?

 

This was before he’d become tech savvy, before he’d learned how to delete messages and turn off the sound notification, before he changed his passcode.

 

Again and again, they argued. Again and again, he said he would end it. But somehow it never happened. There was always a reason - excuse - for him to continue - she was ill, overwhelmed by work, lonely.

 

Until finally, one day, she snapped. Things had been going ok. She’d tried to ignore it, told herself she was being unreasonable - it was just a few texts. They had gone out for her birthday and had a nice meal at her favourite restaurant. He went to the toilet just before they left. When they got home, she looked at his phone and saw he’d sent her a text with a photo of the wine they’d had - from the timing, it was while he was in the toilet. She screamed at him, slammed doors, slept in the spare room. Next morning, she packed a bag and drove off. He rang her phone again and again. She ignored it.

 

She must have driven for a couple of hours, not really taking any notice of where she was going. Eventually, she pulled in at a brown sign for a picnic spot and country park, got out and started walking. In her mind she tried to play out every scenario - stay, leave, insist he left the company, let it carry on, confront her. Her head felt it might explode.

 

She thought of the time she had gone to the pub to pick him up after a work night out. She remembered greeting colleagues she’d met previously and being introduced to new ones. Now she wondered what they had been thinking when they saw her: do you think she knows? She imagined their pity for her. Her stomach curdled and sour bile rose in her throat. She swallowed it back down again.

 

If she left, what would she do? They’d been together so long. She didn’t want to upset their boys. She tried to imagine how awkward it would be if one of their sons got married. How awkward it would be at any family celebration or get-together. It would spoil everything. Then there was the thought of moving to some miserable little house or flat, which made her shudder. Yet, in magazines, she had read about women just like her who had started afresh, met another man. Everything was wonderful. Could she be take that risk? Perhaps she just not being objective enough. She hadn’t confided in anyone about Ian’s behaviour. Maybe if she had, a friend might have told her she was being too sensitive about it. It was just texts.

 

Eventually, she turned back. When she got home, he just stood there, ashen-faced, his arms hanging limply at his sides. “Sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve ended it now.”

 

She looked at him. “Why would I believe that?” she said. “Why would I ever believe anything you ever say to me again, after all the lies you’ve told me?”

 

“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t expect you to… but all I can say is that it really is finished this time.”

 

She went upstairs, unpacked in the spare room. She couldn’t bear to sleep in the same bed as him.

 

Later, when she was in the kitchen, he came in.

“I’ve been a good husband, haven’t I? In thirty years, this is the first, the only….it’s such a small thing. It’s….it’s nothing. It means nothing.”

 

Over the following days they returned to some sort of normality. They had to because it was exhausting.

 

Then he suggested the holiday and she agreed.

 

They had been there a few days and things were going reasonably well, she thought. She went into the bedroom to get a beach wrap. His phone was on the bed so, from habit, she picked it up. There was a message showing on the lock screen. It was from her. Her hands shook as she opened it. There was a long thread, going back a week or so. It was just stuff about work, in-jokes. But they were cosy, intimate even. It was definitely more than a friendship. It was still a relationship. It wasn’t ever going to go away. As Princess Diana had famously once said, there were three people in their marriage. It was, she knew, up to her to decide whether that made it too crowded.

 

****

 

On their last night there they ate at the villa. She set the food on the table and sat down opposite him, pushed a stray hair behind her ear, released a breath from between her lips. She looked straight at him. His eyes were focused on her face, terrified, like the accused awaiting the jury’s verdict.

 

“So… I think… I’ve thought long and hard about it and I think because, you know, on balance… that we… I should” She looked out at the sea, blue and shimmering, then turned her eyes back to him, “risk it.”

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