Page 64 of Stella is Starting Over

‘Tell me one? Tell me one thing that’s happened to your mum, or your sister, or any of your uni friends?’

Obviously I know the answer to this but I’m strangled with how angry I am and I can’t force any words out. So instead I say, ‘Fuck you, Dom. You just don’t like that I told you a hard truth about the immature way you live your life—’

Rose cries, I hear over the baby monitor and from the top of the stairs. I head for the bedroom.

‘I’m leaving,’ Dom says simply. ‘Bye, Stella.’

‘Good!’ I shout back, marching up the stairs two at a time. ‘Great!’

When I come back down from settling Rose, good as his word, he’s gone.

Stella

Richard returns, once again, from Dubai. He brings presents for both me and Rose, and seems genuinely pleased to see me. I feel guilty about having seen Dom twice while he was away, and miserable that neither Dom nor I have made any kind of contact since our massive argument. But I’m determined to put on a decent show for Richard, who has managed to ignore his jetlag to come over for dinner. I make a risotto and we sit down at the table, him full of stories from his meetings, me keeping one eye on the clock to work out when we can go to bed. Or rather, when I can go to bed, because he still hasn’t been upstairs at my house and despite having been dating for almost three months, we still haven’t gone any further than kissing.

Almost as if he’s read my mind, he puts down his fork. ‘I have a surprise for you.’

I try to look enthusiastic. I love surprises. Surprises are my favourite thing. I just also can’t stop thinking about the fact that I’ve got to wash my hair, which either means washing it before I can get into bed tonight, or getting up extra early tomorrow and hoping that the clunking of the boiler doesn’t wake Rose. The other day I tried bringing her into the bathroom while I was showering and she almost got the loo brush into her mouth before I noticed. Suffice to say, no part of any system I try to put in place is working at all well so far.

‘That’s exciting,’ I say, trying to inject enthusiasm into my voice. ‘What is it?’

‘I booked us a holiday.’

A holiday? As in, a holiday for me and him and Rose? We’d need multiple bedrooms, and he hasn’t even met Rose. How am I going to get up with her for her middle-of-the-night feed (which I absolutely have to stop giving her at some point, but can’t face dropping right now)? How on earth is a holiday going to work?

I must look as confused as I feel internally, because he explains. ‘I mean, I’ve booked us two nights away, at a hotel.’

This doesn’t really answer any of my questions. ‘That’s amazing,’ I say. ‘But Gavin only has Rose one night a week.’

Richard smiles. ‘I spoke to your mother and she agreed to come and look after Rose for the Wednesday night, so that we can have a proper break.’

I fix a smile on my face. This is a nice thing. It’s thoughtful. It’s kind. It’s a way for us to have the kind of mini-break a normal couple without a complicated baby-and-ex-husband situation would be able to do. If I were dating someone who had a child, I’d want to go away with just my partner sometimes.

Two nights does feel like such a long time, though. ‘I need to check if I can get the time off work,’ I say, haltingly. ‘I’ve only just gone back so they might think it’s a bit of a piss-take for me to take days off.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ Richard says. ‘And you could always work from there if you need to. It’s a lovely place in the Cotswolds,’ he explains, getting out his phone. He shows me the website for a hotel that I’ve seen various influencers on social media go to. ‘They’ll have great Wi-Fi and places to work if you need to. Though I thought you could spend some time by the pool, get a few treatments, that sort of thing.’

I won’t lie, the idea of lying on a massage table while someone pounds the knots out of my back and rubs me with a nice-smelling oil sounds like the kind of bliss I can hardly imagine. ‘This is so kind of you,’ I say. ‘Let me know what I owe you for the booking.’

He smiles and shakes his head as if the idea of me paying is so silly it’s not worth engaging with. ‘I’m excited to have a longer stretch of time together,’ he says. ‘I know I’ve been a little old-fashioned, insisting on taking things so slowly, but I’m entirely sure that it’s going to be worth it.’

To my surprise, work is completely relaxed about me taking three days off only a few weeks after going back.

‘You need a bit of R and R,’ my boss says when I put the leave request in, half hoping that she would tell me that I can’t go. ‘You seem burnt out.’

I try not to engage with this, but she’s not wrong. My ideas are blunt, my skin is terrible and I’m exhausted all the time.

Similarly, I sort of hope Mum might back out, but no, she’s full steam ahead. We don’t talk about the Calpol incident but she assures me over and over again that she will be careful, and so on the Wednesday morning I find myself packing the only pair of semi-sexy pyjamas that I own, and then going through the tagged photos at the hotel to work out what other, more stylish people have worn there and then trying to create copies of those outfits using my existing wardrobe, which is entirely made of clothes from M&S. And before I know it I’m kissing Rose and squeezing her and trying to blink back tears as we get into the car. She’s going to be with her childminder today, with my mum tonight, her childminder tomorrow and then with Gavin. So realistically, tonight is the only time I’m actually missing with her. And she’d be asleep then anyway. I repeat this inside my head as the car leaves London, pulling onto the motorway. Then I think about what would happen if we died in a car crash and Gavin got full custody of Rose. I’ve got a will, but suddenly I think I should probably make a book of things he’d need to know if he was going to look after her all the time, like how she likes it when I sing her songs from Cabaret, or how she wants her milk cold in the afternoon but warm at bedtime.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Richard asks. He’s sitting across from me, a driver in the front to get us to the Cotswolds. I’m starting to think that maybe Richard can’t drive, which is obviously totally fine but feels like the kind of thing we should have talked about. Does he know that I failed my test four times before I passed? Probably not.

‘Nothing,’ I say, smiling. ‘Just how much I’m looking forward to this trip.’

‘Me too.’ He smiles.

The hotel is divine, even if I do keep sneaking into the bathroom to play videos of Rose on my phone. Our room is a cottage on the property, a short walk from the main house where there are huge drawing rooms with squashy sofas to read books on, and surrounded by sloping lawns and blossom-heavy trees.

‘This is incredible,’ I say honestly as we’re unpacking. He puts all of his clothes away into the wardrobe and I realise that I haven’t shared bedroom space with anyone since Gavin. Usually I’d just leave my suitcase on the floor and pull out the stuff I need, but I sense Richard wouldn’t approve of that, so I unpack properly, my clothes looking very shabby and crumpled in the enormous wardrobe.