Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Unofficial Agreement
EXIT HERE A Novel
Chapter One: The Unofficial Agreement
Let me tell you about the worst good decision I've ever made.
Six months ago, I was standing outside a coffee shop on Merchant Street with one suitcase, a tote bag that had given up structural integrity around the third book, and the phone number of a man who'd just sublet my flat to his girlfriend without telling me. The girlfriend I'd been replaced by was apparently named Serena, moved in with a yoga mat and a salt lamp, and had "really good energy." I had good energy too. What I didn't have was a flat.
I called Kane.
This is the part of the story where you're expecting me to say we have history — some smouldering almost-something from three years ago that never quite became a something. We don't. Kane and I met at a work drinks thing, bonded over the fact that we were both pretending to enjoy the canapés, and have been friends ever since. He is not my type. I don't know what my type is, actually — I've dated enough people to have a very clear picture of what I don't want, which is most of them, but the positive-space version of that shape remains somewhat blurry.
Kane picked up on the first ring.
"My flat situation has collapsed," I said.
"How collapsed?"
"Serena-with-good-energy collapsed."
A pause. "My spare room has a slightly broken blind," he said. "The slats tilt east instead of west. Structurally it's fine."
"I'll take it."
That was six months ago. I am still here. The blind still tilts east. I have stopped noticing either of these things.
This is what living with Kane looks like on a Tuesday.
He gets up at seven, makes coffee — one for him, one for me, mine with oat milk and one sugar because I drink it like a child — and puts it on the kitchen counter before I'm up. I know he does this because by the time I emerge at seven forty-five in a state best described as "the aftermath of a decision," it's there. Exactly the right temperature. Every time.
He reads the news on his phone while I eat toast and make sounds that are technically words. He doesn't try to talk to me until I've had the full coffee. He learned this in week one. Some people take months to learn this. My last boyfriend of seven months never learned this.
In the evenings, he comes home, dumps his jacket on the chair by the door (his one domestic crime — the chair is a jacket museum at this point), and says something like "rough day" or "not bad, actually" and we somehow pick up a conversation we weren't having, in the middle of it, as if we'd pressed pause that morning and just resumed.
I've had friendships that took years to feel like this. Kane and I landed here in about three weeks.
Here is a specific Tuesday, in case the general one wasn't sufficient.
Month three. I'd had a meeting that had gone so badly I'd spent twenty minutes in the office bathroom afterwards doing the controlled breathing thing I'd read about once and mostly found patronising. By the time I got home it was gone eight and the flat was dark except for the kitchen light, and there was a pot on the hob with a lid on it, and a Post-it on the fridge that said bad day? with two boxes underneath: yes and define bad. Both boxes had a tiny checkbox. One of them was ticked — the define bad one — in different ink, suggesting he'd come back to it and changed his mind.
I stood in front of this Post-it for probably ten seconds longer than it warranted.
Kane came out of his room in tracksuit bottoms and a university hoodie he'd had since approximately the Mesozoic, took one look at me, and said: "Right. Food first, then you can tell me or not tell me, I don't need it either way."
I told him. He ate. He asked two questions, both of them the right ones. He didn't offer solutions. He has this quality — I've noticed it — of knowing when a problem wants fixing and when it just wants to be heard. He's better at that distinction than most people who've spent years trying.
Around ten we got into an argument about whether the film we'd put on had a good ending or a cowardly one. I said cowardly. He said good endings and cowardly endings are the same thing when the character earned it. I said earning it is not the same as deserving a soft landing. He said I was applying moral standards to narrative structure, which was technically my job and none of the film's business.
We went back and forth about this for forty minutes. He was wrong. He remains wrong. But at some point during it I realised the thing in my chest from the bathroom had gone — not because he'd fixed it, but because he'd just kept talking to me like I was fine until I was.
He doesn't know I clocked that. Or if he does, he's never said.
I tell you all this because it's important context for what I'm about to tell you about Lexi.
Lexi came for dinner on a Thursday. She comes every Thursday. She is Kane's girlfriend of eight months and she is — and I want to be very precise here — perfectly nice.
She has the kind of organised beauty that suggests she has skincare steps. She brings wine that pairs well with what we're eating, which means she's asked Kane what we're eating, which means she planned. She says please and thank you to the point where you almost feel slightly underdressed in the manners department. She once helped me find a missing AirPod by retracing my steps for twenty minutes, which she called "a little puzzle." She was delighted by the puzzle.
She is, in every measurable sense, fine. Good, even.
It is entirely my own problem that every Thursday, Kane is about fifteen percent different.
I can't fully explain it. He doesn't become someone else. He's still Kane — still dry, still funny, still himself. But he sits up a little straighter. He chooses his words slightly more carefully. He's turned toward her when she talks in a way that looks attentive but doesn't quite look... effortless. Like he's reminding himself.
With me, he'll say "that's the dumbest take I've ever heard" and steal chips off my plate in the same sentence. With Lexi, he'll say "I see what you mean" and ask follow-up questions.
Both versions are kind. One of them is natural.
I'm not saying anything about this. I'm just noting it.
The road trip was Kane's idea, which I should have known would somehow become my problem.
"Joey's been on at me for months about doing the Portmore run again," he said, on a Wednesday evening. He was making pasta. I was sitting on the kitchen counter not helping, which is the division of labour we've arrived at organically.
Joey is Kane's friend from university. I know three things about Joey: he is loud, he is confident in a way that seems entirely unearned, and he once described a film I love as "a bit slow" with the serenity of a man who has never been wrong.
"Define 'road trip,'" I said.
"Portmore. Five days, four nights. Joey drives down with us, we stay at the cottage his parents own. Beach, fish and chips, the usual."
"And by 'us' you mean —"
"Me, Lexi, you." He looked up. "Joey."
"Of course Joey."
"He's not that bad."
"He told me the film Past Lives was 'a bit slow.'"
Kane put the spoon down. "Okay. He's a little bad."
I ate a piece of pasta off the chopping board. "When?"
"Two weeks. I've already looked at your calendar. You have nothing on."
"That is an invasion of privacy."
"You share your calendar with me so I know when you're in late for work and should save you dinner."
This is true. I shared my calendar with Kane in month two because I came home to him making food for one too many times when I'd been stuck at the office. He's never once made a comment about it. He just uses it to know when to save dinner.
"Fine," I said. "But if Joey says something stupid about cinema, I'm getting out of the car."
"We'll be on a motorway."
"I'll tuck and roll."
He put a bowl of pasta in front of me. "Lexi's excited you're coming."
I picked up my fork. "Great," I said.
I meant it. I did.
I also spent the rest of the evening sitting with a feeling I couldn't quite name, which I eventually filed under probably just gas and went to bed.
Two weeks later, my bag was packed. Kane's car was in the street. The blind still tilted east.
I stood in the doorway of my room for a second, looking at my bookshelf, my desk, the corner of the flat that had somehow become mine without my formally agreeing to it.
I thought about the film argument. About two weeks of Tuesdays. About a Post-it with two tiny checkboxes.
Then I picked up my bag and went downstairs.