Chapter 8

The divorce was finalised without drama.

No shouting, no last-minute scenes, no weeping in the car park outside the registry office. The registrar handed over the paperwork, we each signed where we were meant to sign, and that was that.

We walked out of the building side by side.

It was a bright morning.

He stopped on the steps. I kept walking.

"Sophie."

I stopped. I didn't turn around.

"Take care of yourself," he said.

I nodded once, and kept going.

At the end of the street I looked back. He was still on the steps, holding his copy of the paperwork, face turned into the sun. I couldn't read his expression from that distance.

But I knew he wouldn't come after me.

He'd never been someone who came after people.

The first weekend after the divorce, Daisy and I went to IKEA.

She needed things for the new flat. We both did. I bought a floor lamp, a rug, a small table and chair set for her to draw at. Daisy picked out a pink storage box and refused to let me carry it — she insisted on holding it herself the entire way around the shop. She was weaving between strangers with a box bigger than her head, completely untroubled.

I couldn't stop smiling.

The new flat was on the third floor of a converted building — one bedroom, south-facing, good natural light. Claire had found it. The rent was reasonable. I moved in with three boxes: one of clothes for me and Daisy, one of my sketchbooks and equipment, one of Daisy's books and toys.

Ten years of marriage, in three boxes.

It sounds bleak when you say it like that. But it didn't feel that way. The ten years were the bleak part. The boxes were just what came after.

Nathan kept his word about Daisy. Every Saturday afternoon, on time, he'd arrive at the downstairs buzzer. He took her to ride bikes round the block or to feed the ducks at the park. She ran to him when she saw him, arms out, completely guileless.

He'd crouch down and catch her and lift her and spin her once. He was less closed than he used to be — slower, more careful, as if he'd learned to take something gently that he used to just set down and leave. Just too late.

When he brought her back, he'd stand in the doorway for a moment. Sometimes it looked as if he was about to say something, but he never quite did. He'd land on: "Right. I'll head off."

I'd say: "Take care."

And I'd close the door.

Polite. Correct. Neither cold nor warm.

That was what we were to each other now.

Six months after the divorce, a small envelope arrived via Daisy. She handed it over solemnly, the way a diplomat might present a letter.

Inside: a bank card and a folded note.

The note said: The deposit your parents put in when we bought the flat, and what you spent in the years I wasn't paying attention. I've worked it out. The card has what I owe you. Pin is Daisy's birthday.

His handwriting was the same as it had always been. Precise, unhurried, every letter carefully placed.

I looked at the number.

He had genuinely gone through it. Every pound I'd spent from my own savings — the deposit, the months when his account ran short and mine covered it, the classes, the gifts for his family, the small daily things that accumulate to something much larger across seven years.

He'd remembered. Or he'd gone back and worked it out.

I put the card in my bedside drawer.

I didn't give it back. I didn't make a performance of refusing it.

It was mine. I'd earned it in the most exhausting way imaginable and I was keeping it.

Another six months on, Alderton Design had seven or eight steady clients and a reputation that was starting to travel by word of mouth. Claire said it was time to get a proper studio space.

"You can't run a business from a folding table," she told me.

I looked at three spaces. I chose a small unit in an office building — twenty square metres, one long desk, one bookshelf, a window. The rent was manageable.

The day I signed the lease, the letting agent asked for the business name.

"Alderton Design," I said.

I signed: Sophie Alderton.

My hand was steady. It felt entirely different from the last time I'd signed something. That had been an ending. This was something else.

Daisy started primary school and adapted immediately, as children do when the ground they're standing on is finally solid.

She made two friends — a girl called Lily and a girl called Bea. Every afternoon she came out of the gates with something to report: who'd argued with whom, whose pencil case was the best one, who the teacher had praised that day.

One afternoon she ran to me waving a piece of paper.

"My picture is going on the wall at school!"

"What did you draw?"

"Our house! Our family!"

She held it up.

In the picture: a large yellow sun. A small house. Two figures in front of it. One tall, with round glasses and a paintbrush. One small, in plaits, holding a pink box.

Just the two of them.

I crouched down. "It's beautiful," I said. "You've got us exactly right."

"Mummy, are you crying?"

"No. The light's in my eyes."

"There is no sun. We're inside."

"Must be the lamp then."

She gave me a very sceptical look. I picked her up and carried her home through the autumn leaves, which were gold and thick on the pavement.

I used to collect ginkgo leaves and press them flat in the pages of notebooks to use as bookmarks. I didn't collect any today.

My arms were already full.

Back in the flat — our flat, which had become simply home, unqualified — I set Daisy down and she kicked off her shoes and went straight to her drawing table.

I stood in the doorway.

The pink storage box on the windowsill. My sketches pinned to the wall. The floor lamp casting its steady yellow light into the corner of the room.

Small. But it was ours and it was warm.

I thought, for a moment, about the first night I'd moved into Nathan's flat, ten years ago. An evening like this one — sun at that low autumn angle, everything golden. I'd been so hopeful. I'd been absolutely certain that things would keep getting better.

It took ten years to understand the lesson.

Some people, you can chase for a decade and they'll never once turn around. But the moment you stop — the moment you face the other direction and start walking — they notice. They slow down. They wonder where you've gone.

But by then you're already somewhere else.

And you don't need them to turn around anymore.

You just keep going.