Chapter 70 It is not that deep

Chapter 70 It is not that deep

"He is a thief." I say quietly to Roe.

"This should be called as what it is, Stealing!. Callum taking things but reframing them as his and when you call it what it is he tells you that you are the problem for noticing. That is gaslighting. That is what it is called and that is what he is doing and I am not going to sit and working physically and mentally for seventy two hours and watch him take glory on a Stage 4 submission that he is firmly refusing to drop ideas for yet!."

Roe is quiet for a moment.

He puts his pen down.

He looks at me with the expression he gets when he has decided to say something and has chosen his words with more care than he usually applies to the choosing.

"Sera, It's not that deep."

The square does its thing.

The fountain runs.

The pigeons.

The Tuesday afternoon.

All of it continues exactly as it was.

And I sit on a bench in a Paris square and I hear those four words in Roe's voice, gentle, well-meaning, the voice of a friend who is trying to bring the temperature down, and I feel them land in a place that has nothing to do with Roe.

It's not that deep.

I have heard those words before.

Not from Roe.

From other people.

In a past life that only I can remember.

From the friends who knew about Callum and said, he's just busy, it's not that deep.

From the family member who watched me cancel Christmas for the fourth year and said, marriages have rough patches, it's not that deep.

From the version of myself that stood in a bathroom at two in the morning counting thirty two missed calls and said, you're being dramatic, it's not that deep.

It's not that deep.

Four words that were used, every time, to put a lid on something that needed air.

To make the thing that was happening smaller than it was.

To make me smaller than I was.

So that the thing could keep happening.

And I would keep taking the blame for the things happening.

Same things that I did not cause.

Something in my chest that has been holding, that has been holding since the corridor this morning and since Callum's jaw is doing the tight thing and since the half demerit point and since standing in this square and hearing him say go back to as if there is a version of me he is owed that I have temporarily misplaced, that has been holding through all of it with the discipline of a woman who has learned that public spaces require a particular kind of management.

I swallow a sigh.

I give up.

"You are wrong." I say to Roe.

My voice comes out stiff. It's not loud, it doesn't sound angry, instead it sounds like a ball of yarn is lodged in my voice box.

Roe looks at me and sighs, his hand goes to hold mine.

"Sera ..."

"Do not tell me it is not that deep." I say.

"Do not say those words to me. Do not use those words about this, or him." My voice is shaking now in a way I am aware of and yet cannot stop.

"You do not know. You have known him for three weeks. You have been in a room with him for forty eight hours and you think you understand what this is. You do not understand what this is. You do not know what it costs to sit across a table from someone who has spent years taking credit for things that were not his and smiling while he did it and believing, every single time, that this time would be different, that this time he would turn around and acknowledge it, and then watching him stand in a corridor and do it again in front of strangers without hesitation because it is so automatic to him now that he does not even have to think about it." I yank my hand sharply from his, leaving a small mark across his wrist in the process.

"It is not not that deep. It is exactly that deep. It is the deepest thing I have dealt with in this competition and in this city and I am done being told to make it smaller so that everyone else is more comfortable."

Roe is looking at me with his mouth slightly open and his pen in his hand and the expression of a man who said four words with kind intentions and has just discovered that those four words had a room behind them that he did not know existed.

Callum is looking at me from his bench.

I do not look at him.

I look at Roe.

"I need a minute." I say.

My voice is still shaking.

I pick up my notebook.

I walk away from the bench.

I walk across the square past the fountain and the elderly people on the other bench and the pigeons and out through the gap between the buildings on the far side and into the street beyond it and I keep walking.

I do not look back.

The Paris afternoon keeps doing its thing around me.

All of it continuing exactly as it was, indifferent and beautiful, the way Paris has been continuing for longer than any problem I am carrying has existed, and I walk through it with my notebook in my hand and my voice still slightly broken and the echo of four words in my chest that have nothing to do with Roe and everything to do with a life I am the only person in this city who remembers.

It's not that deep.

It was always that deep.

It was deeper than anyone was willing to look.

And I am done standing at the edge of it pretending it is a puddle.

A cool, bothered voice pulls me out of my riverie.

"If you keep walking with your eyes at the back of your head, I wonder which car will suffer your presence today."