The Lonely Long Wait: Voiceless, loveless

The Lonely Long Wait: Voiceless, loveless.

NOVEL STATUS: COMPLETED

PUBLISHED CHAPTERS: 34 CHAPTERS

The Lonely Long Wait: Voiceless, loveless – Inicio

The chicken was getting cold.

Linnet stood at the kitchen counter with her hands flat on the granite and watched the steam above the casserole dish go from a generous plume to a thread to nothing. She’d made a roast — lemon and thyme, the way Edmund liked it, with the skin pulled taut and crisp and the potatoes halved and browned in the drippings until they split open at the edges. She’d set two places at the table with the linen napkins his mother had given them as a wedding gift, the good ones, heavy cotton with a monogrammed T in the corner that she’d always found slightly aggressive, as if the napkins needed to remind her whose family she’d married into.

It was their anniversary. Six years.

She checked her phone. No message. She scrolled past the last exchange — her text at noon, composed with the breezy casualness of a woman who had drafted it three times: Cooking tonight. Be home by seven? His reply, three hours later: Will try.

Will try. Two words that did not, technically, constitute a promise. She’d noticed that about Edmund’s language over the years — the careful deployment of conditionals, the strategic vagueness. He never said I’ll be there. He said I’ll try to be there, which left him a clean exit if something more interesting turned up, and something more interesting always turned up, because Edmund Thaxter was the kind of man around whom interesting things reliably gathered while his wife roasted a chicken for no one.

It was now twenty past eight.

Linnet sat down at her place and looked at the empty chair across from her. The candles she’d lit were halfway consumed, the wax pooling into pale lakes on the tablecloth. She should blow them out. She didn’t. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for — not Edmund, exactly. Something more like the courage to stop.

She listened to the house.

It was a nice house. She’d give it that. A Victorian terrace in the good part of Bath, with bay windows and original cornicing and a garden that she tended on weekends while Edmund was at the hospital or at conferences or at drinks with colleagues that evolved, with the slow inevitability of a weather system, into dinners that evolved into texts sent after midnight: Don’t wait up. She never waited up. She’d stopped waiting up sometime around year three, though she couldn’t pinpoint the exact night. It hadn’t been a decision. It had been a series of eleven o’clock resignations that eventually hardened into policy.

She pulled a plate toward her and served herself. Ate slowly, tasting nothing at first, and then — halfway through the second bite — tasting everything. The chicken was good. The lemon had done its work. The thyme sat in the meat the way good seasoning does, not shouting but there, present, doing what it was supposed to do. She had always been a careful cook. Attentive to temperatures. To timing. To the particular needs of each ingredient. It was, she thought, the thing she was best at: paying close attention to things that didn’t pay her back.

𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗿𝘂𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗴𝗮𝗹𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝗺

At nine, she heard the key in the lock.

Edmund came through the hallway with the particular energy of a man who has been somewhere good — his overcoat carrying a trace of wine-warmed restaurant air, his cheeks flushed, his tie already loosened. He had that look. The slightly overstimulated sheen of a man who’d spent the evening talking about himself to someone who found him fascinating.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, dropping his briefcase by the door in a way that assumed she’d move it later. He didn’t look at her. “Huxley needed a hand with his presentation for the Leeds conference. We ended up grabbing a bite at that Italian near the hospital.”

“There’s food here,” Linnet said.

“I know. I said I’d try.” He kissed the top of her head as he passed — quick, dry, a gesture performed from muscle memory the way one pats one’s pockets for keys. “Smells good, though.”

Smells good, though. Said with his back already to her, already opening the fridge, already pulling out the sparkling water and drinking from the bottle. He didn’t look at the table. Didn’t see the candles guttering in their holders like two small, pointless prayers. Didn’t see the napkins.

“Happy anniversary,” she said.

He paused mid-swallow. She watched something move across his face — not guilt, not quite, but the fleeting arithmetic of a man calculating how much trouble he was in and whether charm could cover the debt.

“Right. Yes. God, Linnet, I’m sorry. This week has been —”

“It’s fine.”

“No, it’s not. Let me make it up to you. This weekend. I’ll book that place in Bradford-on-Avon you liked.”

She nodded. They both knew he wouldn’t book it. He would mean to — genuinely, sincerely mean to — and then Monday would come and the hospital would swallow him the way it always swallowed him, and the weekend would pass and neither of them would mention it again. Because mentioning it would require acknowledging a pattern, and they’d both spent years investing in the fiction that there was no pattern, just a series of isolated disappointments that didn’t add up to anything.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

“I’ll be up soon.”

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