Forget Me, Then Try

By half four, the library had entered its gentler hour.

The schoolchildren had been removed by the weather, the tourists had thinned to a damp, apologetic trickle, and the men who liked to ask whether they could borrow books without ‘all the computer nonsense’ had either been assisted, ignored, or quietly defeated. The rain had started just after lunch and never quite committed to becoming dramatic. It settled instead into a fine, persistent silver against the tall windows, softening the city into something blurred and old-fashioned. Inside, the heat clicked along the radiators, the lamps cast their honeyed pools over wood and paper, and the whole place smelt faintly of dust, binding glue, wet wool, and time.

Willow liked it best like this.

There were louder ways to feel important, but she preferred this one. A building full of people pretending they had come for information when most of them had come because they were lonely, avoidant, cold, curious, vain, heartbroken, recently divorced, newly retired, or unwilling to go straight home. Books helped, obviously. But mostly, people liked to be witnessed arranging themselves.

Willow was very good at that.

A woman in a camel coat stood at the fiction display table with the expression of someone making a poor but emotionally necessary decision.

‘You’re circling Sally Rooney like she owes you money,’ Willow said from behind the desk.

The woman looked up, half startled, half amused. ‘I’m deciding whether I’m in the mood to be devastated.’

‘That one’s not devastation. That’s mostly people failing to say the thing while standing in kitchens.’

‘Is there a better option?’

‘There is always a better option. The question is whether you want catharsis, delusion, or an elegant waste of a weekend.’

The woman smiled despite herself and came over. Willow left her post, crossed the worn carpet, and tilted her head at the shelves.

‘How bad is it?’ she asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘The man. Or woman. I’m very modern in my assumptions.’

A reluctant laugh. ‘Man.’

‘How disappointing. They so often are.’ Willow ran a finger along a shelf, then pulled out a hardback and offered it over. ‘Here. This one understands that being clever does not stop you making terrible choices. Deeply comforting.’

The woman looked at the cover. ‘You just know that from my face?’

‘It’s my job,’ Willow said. ‘Also, your umbrella is broken and you’re wearing lipstick in a shade called Revenge.’

The woman laughed properly then. She took the book, glanced down at it, and visibly softened. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me yet. Bring it back if it ruins your week.’

‘I probably will.’

‘Good. I enjoy being right.’

She watched the woman head towards self-checkout with something like satisfaction. Not triumph, exactly. More the neat click of a thing set into place. Her colleague Nadia, shelving returns nearby, gave her a look over the top of a stack of biographies.

‘Did you just profile a stranger into literary fiction again?’

‘I offered a public service.’

‘You flirted with her through hardbacks.’

‘Please. I’m at work. I flirted with restraint.’

Nadia snorted and went back to the trolley. Willow straightened a pile of paperbacks that did not need straightening and looked out at the rain.

The library suited her in a way very few places did. It was warm without being intimate, orderly without being rigid. Everything had its category, its due date, its correct shelf, even if people themselves rarely did. Here, she knew where to put her hands. She knew how to speak. She knew what version of herself made sense.

Her phone buzzed face-down beside the issue desk.

Not a message. Just the time she had noticed too late.

Nearly five.

She turned the screen over anyway. Nothing from Kenneth.

That was not unusual. Not really. It only felt like something she had noticed more often lately, which was different.

‘You’re frowning at your phone like it’s disappointed you personally,’ Nadia said.

‘It has no right to be that smug on a Thursday.’

‘Your husband still working unreasonable-hours-for-capitalism hours?’

‘Those are his favourite kind.’

Nadia made a sympathetic noise. Willow smiled in a way intended to suggest the matter was both temporary and beneath analysis.

‘He’s in a merger,’ she said. ‘I’m apparently married to a spreadsheet in a navy coat.’

‘Romantic.’

‘Intensely. I may buy the spreadsheet flowers.’

She said it lightly. It landed lightly. That was the point.

At six, the rain was harder. By quarter past, the windows had gone almost black beyond their reflections, and the lamps inside looked theatrical against the glass. Willow zipped herself into her coat, wrapped a scarf round her throat, and did her round with the practiced sovereignty of a woman locking up a kingdom. Nadia left first with a muttered complaint about buses. Willow checked the side doors, reset the front display where a history of Edinburgh had somehow migrated into contemporary romance, and paused for a moment in the main room.

It always had a different sound just before closing. Not silence. Held breath.

Then she switched off the desk lamp, gathered her bag, and stepped into the wet evening.

The cold hit with immediate Scottish efficiency.

By the time she let herself into the flat, her hair had begun to curl at the temples and the hem of her coat was damp. The place was warm, though not because anyone had just been there. The hallway light had been left on, and one lamp in the sitting room cast its small domestic glow over the sofa, the bookshelves, the folded blanket over one arm. Familiar. Comfortable. Entirely still.

She set down her bag, toed off her shoes, and listened.

Nothing.

Not disappointment, exactly. More a tiny internal adjustment, neat as the turn of a key.

Kenneth had said he would be late. Or he might have implied it. There had been something that morning over coffee - a call, a meeting, a phrase like ‘likely running over’ delivered while knotting a tie. She could not remember the exact wording now, only the effect: do not wait.

She went to the kitchen, put water on for tea, then changed her mind and started dinner instead. Pasta. Something fast and forgiving. The radio murmured quietly from the counter, too low to follow properly, just enough to keep the flat company while she chopped garlic and grated parmesan and tried not to clock how naturally she was cooking for two.

By the time she heard his key in the door, the sauce had thickened and the rain was tapping softly against the windows.

Kenneth came in carrying the cold with him. His coat was dark with it at the shoulders. He shut the door, set down his briefcase, and rubbed a hand once over the back of his neck before looking up.

‘Hi.’

‘You live here,’ Willow said, draining the pasta. ‘I was beginning to think I’d need to leave out a saucer.’

His mouth shifted, almost a smile. Half a beat late.

‘Long day,’ he said.

‘So I gathered. You do know most offices let people leave before they begin to fossilise.’

He loosened his tie as he walked in. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

She turned to kiss him as he reached her. He bent automatically, touched his mouth to hers, brief and warm and entirely elsewhere. By the time the contact had registered, he was already reaching past her for a glass from the cupboard.

It was such a small thing that for a second she nearly missed it.

Then she did not.

She handed him the bottle of water without comment. ‘You look thrillingly corporate.’

‘That bad?’

‘Worse. You look competent.’

‘Cruel.’

‘It’s what you married.’

He drank half the glass in one go. His cuffs were still done up. There was a faint line between his brows he had probably forgotten was there.

Willow slid pasta into bowls and set them on the table. Kenneth put his keys down on the small tray by the fruit bowl - except not on the tray, beside it, close enough to count if one were not paying attention.

She noticed because she always noticed. Small domestic geographies mattered. Objects accrued habits. So did people.

‘Eat before it congeals into something biblical,’ she said.

They sat.

The kitchen table was narrow enough to feel companionable when they were talking and slightly absurd when they were not. Tonight the silence was not empty. The radio in the other room muttered indistinctly. Rain traced the window. The radiator gave an occasional click like a restrained opinion. Kenneth ate with the subdued focus of a man continuing his day by other means.

‘How was the library?’ he asked after a minute.

‘Full of the usual moral confusion. One woman wanted something uplifting but not embarrassing about it.’

‘Did you manage the impossible?’

‘Naturally. I am a professional.’

He nodded, twirled more pasta, and for a moment she had the ridiculous urge to say something sharper just to test whether he was actually in the room. Instead she took a sip of water.

‘I had a man ask if we organised books alphabetically because of woke policy.’

That got a realer response. A brief exhale through the nose. ‘What did you say?’

‘That the Victorians beat him to it.’

A proper smile, there and gone.

‘You’re terrible.’

‘I’m efficient. There’s a difference.’

‘Is there?’

‘Massive one. If I were terrible, I’d have told him his opinions were why Dewey invented decimals.’

He was still faintly smiling when he reached for the parmesan. It eased something in her, though not very far.

‘You should put that on a tote bag,’ he said.

‘And deprive the public of my spontaneous brilliance? Never.’

He nodded again, but the look had already started to leave his face. Something in him turning back towards wherever he had been all day. Not rudely. Not deliberately. Just with the smooth inevitability of a tide pulling off stone.

She watched him for a second too long.

‘Did you eat already?’ she asked.

The question came out lightly enough. It passed for ordinary. She hated, as soon as she heard it, how close it had stood to another one.

He looked up. ‘No.’

‘Right.’

‘I said I’d be home.’

‘You are home,’ she said, with a small shrug that tried to make the point harmless. ‘I’m not staging an inquiry.’

His gaze stayed on her for a moment, attentive now in a way that made her wish she had said nothing at all.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It ran late.’

‘Kenneth, I’m feeding you pasta, not serving papers.’

That earned the shadow of another smile. She smiled back because it was easier than deciding whether she meant it.

He went back to his dinner. After a moment he said, ‘We’re near the end of it.’

‘The merger?’

‘Mm.’

‘Near as in this week, or near as in before one of us dies?’

He considered. ‘Reasonably near.’

‘That reassuring precision again. Be still, my heart.’

‘I’m trying to give you hope.’

‘I’d settle for a calendar invitation.’

He looked at her then, properly this time. Tired, yes. Present for a second in the careful way he always was when he sensed he had missed a step and was trying to work out where.

‘It won’t be like this for ever,’ he said.

Something in the sentence made her still.

Not the content. The shape of it. As if they had already been having a different conversation beneath the visible one.

She twirled her fork slowly. ‘I know.’

And she did know. Intellectually. Work intensified. Projects swallowed months. Adults got tired and distracted and occasionally became less vivid to each other for reasons that were boring and recoverable. None of this was a crime. None of it should have lodged under her ribs the way it had begun to.

He reached for his glass. She reached for hers at the same time. Their fingers nearly knocked.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘You’re saying that a lot tonight.’

‘Am I?’

‘Mm.’

He glanced down, as if searching back through the evening for evidence. ‘I don’t think I am.’

‘No?’ She tilted her head. ‘Maybe I’m projecting a whole apology narrative onto you. Very unhealthy of me.’

His mouth moved, not quite smile, not quite protest.

‘You’re tired,’ he said.

‘So are you.’

‘Yes.’

There it was again - that odd, flat place where another version of the conversation might have lived and simply did not.

She finished before he did and began gathering plates simply because she could not bear to keep sitting still under that quiet. At the sink, she rinsed dishes under hot water and watched his reflection faintly in the dark window over the taps. He was still at the table, one elbow braced against it, looking down at nothing she could see. Handsome in a way that had never been flashy. Dark hair needing a cut. Shirt sleeves still buttoned. A face people probably trusted on sight.

Once, he had come home and talked to her from door to bed, from bed to kettle, from kettle to sofa, as if the shape of his day only settled when it passed through her first. Now she got the edited version. Bullet points. A summary drafted for someone already assumed to understand the wider context.

Perhaps she did.

Perhaps that was what marriage was after long enough - not less intimacy, exactly, but less visible effort. The confidence of not needing to translate every thought. The understanding that silence could also be company.

Perhaps.

She dried her hands and turned. ‘Do you want tea?’

He blinked slightly, as if returning. ‘No, thanks.’

‘Thrilling evening we’re having.’

‘Sorry.’

She smiled before she could stop herself. ‘There you are again.’

This time he almost laughed.

He stood and brought his bowl to the sink. She moved aside to let him set it down. In the smallness of the kitchen, the near miss of his body was suddenly more noticeable than contact would have been. Wool coat gone, shirtsleeves now rolled back, the clean scent of rain still faint on him beneath soap and the colder trace of the outside air. He set one hand lightly at her waist to pass behind her.

Automatic. Gentle. Entirely familiar.

By the time she turned her head, he had already moved away.

She looked at the counter instead. At the water ring under his glass. At the keys still not on the tray.

‘Tomorrow might be late as well,’ he said.

‘Mm.’

‘I’ll text.’

‘You own a phone. I had assumed as much.’

He leaned one shoulder briefly against the counter opposite her. ‘Willow.’

Her name, in that tone, had usually meant he was about to say something that mattered.

She looked up.

But whatever it had been seemed to alter while she watched. He glanced away first, towards the sitting room, the lamp, the darkened window beyond.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just - it’s almost done.’

The radiator clicked.

Outside, the rain went on with patient, indifferent conviction.

Willow looked at him, at the tiredness he wore so neatly it was almost a second shirt, at the distance that was not distance exactly but some quieter failure of reach. She could have asked then. Are we all right. Is this just work. Are you still here with me when you’re here. The questions rose, clean and sharp, and stopped behind her teeth.

Instead she said, ‘You should shower before you fall face-first into a spreadsheet.’

A pause.

Then, very slightly, his expression changed - not relief, not quite, but something adjacent to it. ‘Probably.’

He touched her shoulder as he passed. The gesture was affectionate. Real. Also insufficient in a way she could not have defended under cross-examination.

When he had gone upstairs, she stood alone in the kitchen for a moment, listening.

Not silence. Never silence.

Water beginning in the pipes above her. The low hum of the fridge. Rain against glass. The old radiator ticking itself cooler, then warm again. A city outside continuing with the business of weather and stone and strangers.

She picked up his keys and set them properly on the tray.

Then she switched off the kitchen light and followed him up, carrying with her the small, unreasonable certainty that something in the room had shifted, though she could not yet have said what, or when, or whether the change had begun with him at all.