Chapter 8: Hana

For the following three weeks I was, by my own assessment, an objectively good version of myself.

I say this not boastfully but as a comparative data point: I have been, at various junctures, a person managed by her own caution, and during those weeks I was the other version — the one who texts back promptly, who shows up, who does not construct elaborate professional justifications for not doing the thing she wants to do.

We saw each other on Tuesday evenings and Sunday afternoons, which is not a formal arrangement but became one through repetition — a Tuesday rhythm and a Sunday rhythm, each with its own texture. Tuesdays were dinner, usually central, always with wine and a long walk after. Sundays were something else — the market and then his kitchen, or the BFI, or once a canal walk to Little Venice that took three hours and covered more ground conversationally than we had since Dubai.

He had a habit of leaving a note in my coat pocket. Not always — just sometimes, on the Tuesdays when I'd left my coat on his chair while we ate. Small things: a sentence about something we'd talked about that he hadn't finished making his point about. A book recommendation with three words of explanation. Once, a sketch of the Millennium Bridge with a small label that said: Dampers installed. Still standing.

I read these on the tube home and the specific quality of the reading — the particular private warmth of it — was something I was going to have to stop finding as good as I found it, or accept that I found it that good, and I had been gradually working toward the acceptance.

Clara had, at this point, met him twice. Once accidentally (he'd come to drop off a book he'd borrowed, which was a technically valid reason to appear at the door of my flat, and Clara had been in the kitchen and had come out and met him in the hallway with the alert look of a person assembling an opinion quickly) and once on a Sunday afternoon at the pub near ours when the three of us had ended up there by proximity and it had been easy in the way of things that are easy when both parties are genuine.

Clara had said, afterward: "He's not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Someone more — " She paused. "I expected someone who knows he's good-looking to use that more."

"He doesn't use it at all."

"I know. That's the thing. He seems to have made a decision somewhere that being exactly himself was sufficient and he didn't need to manage the impression." She considered. "It's quite disarming."

"Tell me about it," I said.

She looked at me. "You've already told him, haven't you. That you're in it."

"I told him I'm in it."

"Good," she said. And went back to her book, which was the entirety of the feedback she gave, which was also the entirety of the feedback that was needed.

---

The evening it went wrong was a work event.

I want to be precise about this because the wrong is not what it looks like from outside, or not only. The wrong was a wound with specific geometry and the geometry is important.

The event was a property and development industry thing — a quarterly networking evening, the kind that happens in a glass-walled space in the City and involves people standing with drinks discussing market conditions and Q3 projections in the specific tones of people who have attended many events like this and are performing their enjoyment of attending events like this.

I was there because one of Meridian's biggest clients was the presenting partner and attendance from our strategy team was expected. Alex was there because he had attended this event for four years and was, in the industry, the kind of person other people wanted to talk to.

We had not planned to be at the same event. We discovered it independently, two days prior, and had texted about it with the specific pleasure of a coincidence that is only a coincidence in the most technical sense — by this point, we occupied enough of the same city that overlaps were inevitable.

I arrived at seven-fifteen. He arrived at seven-thirty. I saw him come in from across the room — the blue shirt, the easy posture, the way he moved into a room without adjusting himself to fit it. I raised my hand. He saw me and smiled, the private one.

He was stopped on his way over by a man I didn't know, and then by another, and the networking portion of the evening did its work on both of us separately for a while.

I was deep in a conversation about sustainable materials and their brand implications with a very earnest woman from a property group when I looked up and saw Alex across the room.

He was talking to a woman.

This is a neutral piece of information. He talks to many people. The event was full of people.

What made this specific was: the woman was looking at him with an expression I recognised, though it was not aimed at me. It was the expression of someone who knows a person very well and finds the knowing bittersweet — the warm residue of something that had been more than this. And he was looking at her with the expression of someone who is genuinely pleased to see a person and is also navigating something carefully.

They were close in the way of people who had once been closer. The specific distance of an old intimacy now maintained at a respectful threshold.

He said something. She laughed — a real laugh, the kind that rearranges a face.

He leaned in to say something and put a hand briefly on her arm.

I looked away.

The earnest woman was still talking about materials. I returned my attention and said something accurate about brand certification and the consumer trust premium.

A few minutes later Alex appeared at my side. "Sorry," he said, "— Marcus corner-trapped me for twenty minutes."

"The industry," I said.

"Always the industry." He handed me a drink I hadn't asked for and which was, I noted, exactly right. "How's the materials conversation going?"

"I've been invited to a conference in Berlin."

"Will you go?"

"Almost certainly not, but I was polite about it."

He looked at me. Then around the room. Then back. "I saw you see that," he said.

I looked at him. There it was: the direct approach, the no-threshold policy.

"Who is she?" I said.

"Hana," he said. "She's — we were together. I told you about her. The three years."

"I know," I said. "I put it together."

He was quiet for a moment. The event went on around us.

"How are you doing?" he said. Very simply.

"Fine," I said, which was the automatic response and which we both heard as the automatic response.

"Zara."

I looked at him. "I'm fine. It's fine. I don't — I'm not going to make something out of nothing."

"It's not nothing," he said. "It's — she's here, I'm here, and I didn't mention she'd be here because I didn't know, and I can see you arranging your face."

"I'm not arranging my face."

"You're being extremely controlled," he said. "Which is what you do when you're feeling something you're not sure about."

I held his gaze.

"Did you tell her about me?" I said.

A beat. "I said I was with someone I'd met recently," he said. "On a delayed flight."

Someone I'd met recently. On a delayed flight.

I looked at my drink.

Not his girlfriend. Not someone he was — involved with. Someone met recently. Contextualised as a delay.

"That's accurate," I said, carefully.

"It's how I described it in the context of a brief conversation at a networking event," he said. "It's not how I'd describe it to someone who asked me properly."

"What would you say if someone asked you properly?"

"I'd say that I met someone in Dubai after a cancelled flight who I've been seeing consistently for five weeks and who I think about more than is probably efficient and whose company is the best part of most of my weeks."

I looked at him. The event noise. The City view through the glass. The woman called Hana somewhere behind me.

"That's a very comprehensive answer," I said.

"I told you I don't stay on the wrong side of the threshold."

I looked at my ring. The geometric silver thing. I had been wearing it every day since I bought it in the gold souk and I had not examined this closely.

"I need some air," I said.

"Okay," he said.

"Not — this isn't me leaving."

"I know."

"I just need a moment."

"I know," he said. "I'll be here."

I went to the roof terrace, which was open and cold and had the City at night spread across it in the way that always made me feel the city was too large to be afraid of small things. I stood at the railing and breathed cold air and looked at the Gherkin and Canary Wharf and thought about: thresholds.

The thing that had caught was not Hana. Hana was history, I understood that — history held carefully, which spoke well of him. The thing that had caught was the word someone. Not because it was wrong, but because I hadn't known, until I heard it, that I had been thinking of myself as a specific rather than a general.

I had been thinking: us. Without using the word.

Which was information about me, not him.

He came out after five minutes. Not to check on me — or not only. He came out because he had said he'd be here and here was now the roof terrace.

"For the record," he said, standing beside me at the railing, "the someone I described — I didn't use that word because it's how I think of you. I used it because I was giving her a brief, courteous explanation that didn't require her to process more than was relevant."

"I know," I said.

"But I wanted to say it."

"I know," I said again.

We looked at the City.

"I should have introduced you properly," he said. "I saw you across the room and it happened fast and I was —" He paused. "I was navigating."

"You navigated badly."

"I did," he said. "I'm sorry."

I looked at the Gherkin. At the lights. At November London doing its level best.

"What are we, Alex?" I said. "I'd like to say it out loud, since we're both here."

He turned to look at me. "I think we're two people who have been very carefully working toward each other," he said. "And who are now, most of the way there."

"Most of the way."

"The last bit," he said, "I've been waiting for you to decide."

I looked at him. The dark eyes in the rooftop light. The expression that was, as I had catalogued, consistently the same: present, warm, certain.

Most of the way there.

I thought: I know. I know what this is. I have known since the shuttle, since one headphone, since you look like someone who's made a specific decision about milk.

I thought: I am better at this than I am acting.

"Alex," I said.

He was very close. The space between us on the rooftop railing was nothing. He was looking at me with the expression that had stopped managing itself weeks ago.

I leaned in.

The door behind us opened.

A group of six came out onto the terrace, loudly, in the manner of people escaping a too-warm event, bringing their drinks and their conversation with them.

The moment collapsed.

We both straightened slightly, not significantly, but enough. He looked at me. I looked at him.

Something in his face that was trying not to be funny and was failing, and something in mine that was the same.

"I'm going to start avoiding doors," he said.

"Doors, phones," I said. "Between them they've ruined approximately everything."

"Not everything," he said. "Not yet."

I looked at him.

"Yet," I said.

He smiled. Yet was the right word and we both knew it.

We went back inside.

For the rest of the evening he stayed near me, which was not a consolation gesture — it was simply where he was. We talked to other people and returned to each other and the navigation of that was easy, as it had been easy since Dubai, the particular ease of two people who have found their own frequency and can rest there.

Hana left at nine. She stopped to say goodbye to him; he introduced me — "Zara, a friend — " and caught himself half a word late: "— Zara."

Just Zara.

I shook her hand. She was warm and direct and looked at me with nothing more complex than a polite greeting, which told me that whatever she and Alex had been, she had finished that chapter and he had too.

She left. We stayed until nine-thirty.

Outside, in the November air, I said: "You were going to call me a friend."

He stopped. "I was," he said.

"And you caught it."

"And I caught it," he said. "Because you're not — you're Zara. There isn't a word for the category yet but it's not friend and I didn't want to use it."

I looked at him in the city night.

"There will be a word," I said.

"There will be a word," he agreed.

"Soon," I said.

He looked at me with the warmth and the certainty and the patience.

"Soon," he said.

The tube home. The ring on my finger, turned twice. The city going on outside the window.

Most of the way there.

I thought: I know what the last bit is.

I thought: tomorrow.

I thought this quite seriously, for the first time without the qualifier of eventually or when I'm ready.

Tomorrow, I thought.

Or tonight, even.

I looked out the window at the dark tunnel walls and thought: I am done being most of the way anywhere.