Chapter 2

Coraline moved into the main bedroom on the Saturday, while I was at the market.

I came back with bread and flowers.

Her cardigan was on my side of the bed, and my things were out in the hallway in two suitcases, packed by somebody who had gone through my drawers.

Desmond was in the kitchen putting away her cereal.

"She can't do stairs at seven months," he said, before I'd taken my coat off. "The guest room's perfectly nice. It's got the good light."

"It has."

He waited for the rest of it. When it didn't come, he relaxed all the way down through his shoulders, the way he does.

"See, this is what I mean about you. Any other woman would be screaming the house down."

"Desmond."

"Mm."

"The Kestrel flat completed on Thursday." I put my keys down on the counter, one at a time, so they didn't rattle. "She owns it outright now. Not you."

He looked up.

"You've put a two-bedroom in the name of a woman you've known nineteen months," I said.

"No charge over it. No declaration of trust. Nothing at all. If she leaves you, she leaves with a flat."

I watched him work that out. It took about four seconds, and his jaw did something at the end of it.

"That's — she wouldn't."

"No," I said. "I'm sure she wouldn't."

Sat 15 March. D: "Any other woman would be screaming the house down."

I took the suitcases into the guest room and unpacked them properly, on hangers, because I intended to be there a while.

After he went up I stood in that hallway a while, looking at the two suitcases and the hall table and the row of coats.

Then I started moving my things out of that house, one at a time.

Not dramatically. Nobody in that house noticed a single item go, which was the entire point of doing it that way.

The Kandinsky print went first, out of the study.

There's a Sotheby's lot number on the back of it in my father's handwriting, dated 1998, and a customs sticker he never bothered to peel off.

Desmond has told four separate dinner parties that he found it in a shop in Lisbon.

It was in storage by Monday.

Then the dining table, the rugs, and both bookcases. Then my mother's tea service, which lived in a cabinet Coraline had already started calling hers.

It took nine days, in daylight, with a van. Desmond was at the office for every one of them.

The only thing anybody said to me about any of it was Nadia, my assistant, on the Thursday, when she signed the storage inventory.

"Elodie." She looked at the list. "This is the whole house."

"It's the whole house that's mine. There's a difference and I've been very careful about it."

"Does he know?"

"He knows I've been tidying."

The financial part took less time than the furniture.

I couldn't touch the eleven per cent of Halliday my father left me. It's held in trust, and I have never once needed it.

But there were other things, none of them complicated, and every one of them in my name.

The joint account I'd been funding since 2018 came down to a working balance, and the card he uses for lunches came off my line and onto his own.

The lease on the house is held by my father's company, and Desmond has been calling that house our place for nine years.

It came up for renewal in July. I asked the Halliday property office not to send him the papers.

I sent Rafael a photograph of every document before I did anything, because I had agreed to that in a kitchen at midnight and I keep agreements.

He answered the first one with a single line.

Good. Keep going, and nothing with your name on it.

By the end of that fortnight, the house Desmond lived in held his own furniture, his mother's china, and Coraline's cereal. Almost nothing else in it belonged to anybody.

He noticed on a Sunday, standing in the hall, turning around once, slowly.

"It's very echoey in here."

"It is."

"Did we always have this little?"

"You've never had anything, Desmond."

He laughed. He genuinely thought I was making a joke about interior design.