This is the first time it truly hits me: it’s not just Zach I’m breaking up with, it’s his whole family too. His wonderful, sweet mother, who always tells me how lovely and slim I look (even though I’ve put on more than fourteen pounds since I first got together with Zach, and wasn’t all that slim to begin with) and makes us such lovely home-cooked meals whenever we visit. His madcap dad with his shed full of tinkery inventions and his stepmum, who works for Mac Cosmetics and always lets me use her staff discount, and tells me how she wishes she had my bone structure or my curly hair. His younger sister, with her . . . well, apart from being the most mature twenty-two-year-old I’ve ever met, his younger sister’s pretty ordinary, but she’s so easy to get along with.
And then, of course, there’s his older brother Matty and his husband Alex, who treated me like I was one of the family from day one, their instant friendly banter a welcome relief from the polite parental inquisitions. They’re the nicest, sweetest people I know. Alex has even come to concerts with me and my dad a couple of times, like he’s part of our family. And Matty is easily one of the funniest, friendliest guys I’ve ever met. (Something Zach has always been jealous of, a reaction which I’ve always found quite cute.) It makes my chest feel tight, the idea of cutting them all out of my life. Of throwing Zach out of the apartment, and all of them along with him.
But his family isn’t enough to make up for everything that’s happened these last few days.
“What about the anniversary party?” I snap at him instead, scowling. “Do you really think I care about that right now? Zach, it’s like—it’s like you’re not listening to me. God. Of all the things we . . . That party is the last thing on my mind.”
“I’m just saying,” he mumbles.
“Yeah? Yeah, well maybe there were a lot of things you should have been just saying for the last four years.”
“Rena—”
“Save it,” I bark at him, the nickname he’s so fond of grating on me. I finish the tea, all but hurling the spoon toward the sink when I’m done, ignoring his wince at the noisy clatter of metal on metal, and storm back into my squished corner of the living room/dining room to go back to work. I seriously doubt I’ll be able to focus on work anyway. The only thing I’ve been able to think about this week is Zach, Zach, Zach.
Not even a phone call earlier today from one of the women on my team laying into me for using last year’s data in a report by mistake is enough to distract me.
(And it really should be, because she berates me for a solid thirty-eight minutes over my slipup, which made her look like an idiot in a meeting with senior managers where she had to present the report. I don’t even have the energy to point out that she had two days to look at my work and let me know, and probably shouldn’t have just winged it.) Zach potters around quietly, doing some housework. He moves quickly, silently, efficiently, dusting and polishing, sweeping the floor. He seems to be making every effort not to disrupt me, which I know I should appreciate, but really, it just makes my blood boil.
I don’t think I’m an irrational person. Far from it. But I know I’m being irrational for resenting how much effort he’s putting in to not making this worse, and I can’t do anything about it.
*
“It’s because he doesn’t get it,” I moan down the phone to my friend Vicki, looking desperately to the heavens.
While Zach takes a shower, I’ve shut myself out on the balcony to talk to my best friend. We don’t work together anymore, but that never stopped us being friends. And God, I’ve been dying to talk to her, not just swap messages over WhatsApp about it all.
“I kind of don’t blame him,” she tells me, somewhat reluctantly.
What a traitor. “I mean, listen, sweetie, I get it, I do, but . . . You’ve met Zach. He’s not exactly . . . ” She searches for a word, and apparently doesn’t come up with one inoffensive enough. Instead she says, “I mean, the boy could not be more laid back if he tried. He probably didn’t see this coming in a million years.”
I groan, exasperated, and lean over the balcony railing. The evening is cold and the air is thick and gray with drizzle. I’m mostly protected by the balcony above ours, but the rain that falls softly on my bare arms feels refreshing.
There’s a couple walking their dog out on the main road, and I’m horribly jealous of them, for so many reasons. Not least because Zach is horrified at the idea that I want a cat, and that really should’ve been an indication of bigger problems from the start.
“It’s infuriating,” I try to explain, turning my back to them. “Either I’m a total bitch going off on one, or he’s just moping around the apartment like a kicked puppy and being so fucking nice like I’ll just change my mind and everything will magically be solved.”
“I think it’s sort of sweet, that he wants to try to work things out,”
Vicki tells me. “I mean, how many girls would kill for a guy that wants to work through problems like this, and tries to talk things through?”
“And calls them a bitch?”
“You can be a bit of a bitch, you know. You can be kind of a Karen, sometimes too.”
“You’re one to talk,” I snap back at her, although honestly, I can’t come up with a single example of Vicki losing her shit over something trivial.
“Oh, I’m sorry, would you like to file a complaint with my manager?”
I snort, despite myself, and she erupts in peals of laughter.
“All I’m saying is, maybe you should hear him out. Maybe this is all just cabin fever, you know? The lockdown talking. It’s a weird, scary, stressful situation, so it’s hardly surprising you guys had a fight over something.”
My scowl returns. “This isn’t lockdown talking, Vicks. This is way bigger than that.”
“Okay.”
“As for hearing him out—why should I? He hasn’t heard me out.
He just thinks I’m blowing things out of proportion, or that it’s not worth getting so worked up over.”
Vicki gives a sympathetic hum. I called her for some support, some solidarity, but also so she could talk some sense into me. She’s good at calling me on my shit, so I knew that if Vicki thought I was overreacting and being ridiculous, there was a solid chance I was overreacting and being ridiculous—but so far, she hasn’t. She’s just tried to offer “perspective” in case it’ll help me “approach the discussion from a new angle.”
(Spoiler alert: it won’t.)
She obviously knows that it’s not doing any good, though, because she clears her throat and moves on quickly, her voice all upbeat.
“What if we just smuggled you out, off the balcony?” she suggests, and I can hear the grin in her voice. “Hire a crane. Or we could create a whole pulley system. I’ll come over with my bicycle and we can just, like, lift you out of there or something. Oh! You could tie all your sheets together and climb down, like a makeshift Rapunzel.
We’ll call a taxi to be your getaway driver.”
The crushing weight of the ruins of my relationship disappears for a moment, and I forget about everything while we come up with crazier and crazier ways to break me out of the apartment block, and I’m in fits of laughter that leave me wheezing for breath and teary eyed.
And for a second, everything feels like it’ll be okay.
apartment #14 – imogen
Chapter Twenty-two
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