Since Stephen moved in, one of my greatest pleasures was simply waking up beside him every morning.
After six months of late-night meetings, phone calls, the bedsit and constantly travelling backwards and forwards, there was something wonderfully ordinary about having breakfast together before work.
This was what I’d wanted.
A normal life with the man I loved.
Stephen’s new office was only a bus ride into the centre of town, and on his first morning I sent him off feeling ridiculously proud — like a parent watching their child disappear through the school gates for the first time.
This job felt important.
Not just for Stephen, but for us.
The pay, conditions and benefits were excellent. When Stephen discovered exactly what his salary would be, I told him, “You’ve really landed.”
I wanted him to make the most of the opportunity.
“Open ears, closed mouth,” I advised him.
“And a level of humility.”
“I will try to remember that,” he replied.
I had even deliberately arranged some time off work around the beginning of his new job. I told him it would give me a chance to do some work on our home and “settle you in to home and the job.”
“Perfect,” he replied.
In my mind, the two things were connected. We had spent so much time talking about how to make this transition work that I wanted to give Stephen every possible chance to settle into both his new home and his new working life.
During that first week he was issued with a laptop and lanyard, began his training and met the other people who were starting alongside him.
I loved coming home and hearing about his day.
He told me about his new colleagues and the friendships beginning to form. I was pleased for him. In the six months I’d known Stephen, I’d become conscious that his world was considerably smaller than mine. A job wasn’t only going to give him financial independence. It would give him structure, purpose and a social world of his own.
One of the women he mentioned was J.
They had lunch together and there was something strangely familiar about her. Stephen wondered whether they might have crossed paths on a dating site at some point.
He also told me that she was his type.
I didn’t particularly like hearing that, but I was reassured by the fact that he was telling me. If there was anything to worry about, surely he wouldn’t be openly discussing her with me.
It wasn’t long, however, before small things began to unsettle me.
Within days of starting work, Stephen went to the pub by himself after finishing for the day.
It bothered me more than I thought it should.
He had previously told me that during his marriage he would often avoid going home, stopping at the pub instead. Now, after all those months of telling me how desperately he wanted us to live together, I couldn’t understand why he would want to delay coming home to me.
I began offering to collect him from work.
There were perfectly ordinary reasons for doing that. It saved him getting the bus. I got to see him sooner. I wanted to help him settle into this new life.
Stephen had told me before that being with me made things easier. Even mundane things felt nice. Hard things felt easier.
I liked being that person for him.
But there was another thought beginning to creep in too.
If I collected him, he couldn’t go to the pub.
I didn’t want to manage Stephen. I didn’t want to monitor where he went or what he did.
But increasingly, I noticed that I felt safer when I knew where he was.
One evening I met J outside his workplace when she was with Stephen and another colleague.
There was nothing obviously threatening about her. Meeting her should probably have reassured me.
Instead, I found myself wondering why Stephen had been so interested in her.
Perhaps that said more about me than it did about him.
As the weeks passed, much of Stephen’s training moved online and he began working from home.
Our ordinary domestic life continued around it.
We talked about dinner and shopping, watched football, laughed, made plans and enjoyed our evenings together.
But alongside that ordinary life, I began noticing things that worried me.
Stephen stopped getting up with me in the mornings.
Sometimes he would get up for a cigarette with me and then go back to bed.
Although we had created a proper home office for him, he often worked from the kitchen instead. He wasn’t always properly dressed. He smoked constantly, sometimes going outside every fifteen or twenty minutes.
He occasionally missed the beginning of meetings or seemed distracted by things completely unrelated to work.
This surprised me.
Stephen was intelligent and could be incredibly studious when something interested him. More importantly, this job mattered. Employment had been the boundary I had set before he could move into my home. His salary represented independence and the possibility of the future we had been planning.
Yet he seemed increasingly casual about it.
He also began complaining about people, procedures and aspects of the training.
I encouraged him to persevere.
Some of the training covered extremely difficult subjects. One morning he messaged me:
“🤬 really struggling today!”
The entire morning had been about domestic abuse.
“That’s hard, darling. ❤️” I replied. “Just think… mindsets: don’t focus on the past and its challenges. Think of the future and how you may help someone.”
I knew some subjects could touch painfully on Stephen’s own history, and I tried to understand that.
But it was becoming difficult to understand where his distress ended and something else began.
He seemed increasingly agitated.
He smoked more.
He became restless and sometimes almost adolescent in the way he behaved during online meetings.
I kept trying to help.
I encouraged him. Reassured him. Tried to reframe things when he became negative. Tried to make home comfortable. Tried to give him reasons to persevere.
This was supposed to be our six weeks to find our groove.
But instead of settling into it, Stephen seemed to be becoming more unsettled.
One evening in early July, while we were apart, I could sense something was wrong.
Stephen told me he thought it might have something to do with work, although he didn’t know exactly what.
I found myself questioning that.
“I don’t think it’s to do with a thing or an environment,” I told him. “Nothing in the future will fix it. It’s within you.”
I tried to explain what I meant.
“It seems every time we remove what troubles you, you remain troubled by a new thing.”
I worried that whatever was making Stephen unhappy might follow him regardless of how much his circumstances improved.
“I fear this may chase you the rest of your life,” I told him.
“I don’t think it’s situational.”
Stephen said he didn’t know what I meant.
Perhaps it was a conversation better had when we were together.
Later that Friday evening he was now at his dad’s to spend a weekend with his sons. He messaged:
“I am so confused.”
I asked him why.
There was no immediate answer.
I could see that he was still online.
Something about it bothered me.
“Are you talking to someone else?” I asked.
“You’re staying online but not responding.”
Stephen said he didn’t know what to say and that he had just gone upstairs to bed.
I suggested we talk on the phone.
And we did.
At the time, I had no idea what, if anything, had prompted the strange feeling I had that evening.
I only knew that something about Stephen felt different.
As the weeks went on, other things added to my unease.
Then came 19 July 2021 — so-called Freedom Day — when most remaining legal Covid restrictions in England were lifted.
My sons wanted to celebrate properly.
They planned to go clubbing and bring their friends back to the house afterwards. I thought they deserved to enjoy themselves after everything young people had missed during lockdown, so Stephen and I agreed to get out of their way.
I booked us a hotel in the centre of town.
It seemed perfect.
I could go to work as usual, and Stephen’s office was practically around the corner.
Except Stephen had apparently arranged to continue working remotely because of his mental health.
That disappointed me.
Instead of going into the office, he would now be alone in the hotel room while I was at work.
One evening when I returned, Stephen told me something that made me uneasy.
He’d been outside the hotel having a cigarette when J happened to walk past on her way to work.
She was surprised to see him.
Why was Stephen standing outside a hotel when he was supposedly working from home?
I don’t know exactly what explanation he gave her.
But Stephen told me he’d also mentioned that he’d been drinking whisky while working.
I couldn’t believe it.
Why would you tell a colleague that?
Why would you be drinking whisky during the working day at all?
I was becoming increasingly frustrated.
He had this fantastic opportunity and seemed determined not to take it seriously.
One evening, we went to Nando’s for dinner.
While I was queuing, Stephen suddenly disappeared.
I looked around and couldn’t see him anywhere.
Then I spotted him emerging from a convenience store.
He’d bought cigarettes.
This irritated me enormously because one of the agreements we’d made when he moved into my home was that he wouldn’t smoke cigarettes anymore, only rolling tobacco.
Perhaps to somebody else that distinction sounds ridiculous.
But we’d discussed it.
He’d agreed.
And now he’d simply done what he wanted anyway.
We argued.
That night, there was an unpleasant atmosphere between us at the hotel.
Increasingly, it seemed that small agreements I’d believed we’d made together didn’t necessarily carry the same weight for Stephen that they did for me.
There was something else happening that summer.
Women were becoming a subject.
With restrictions lifted and the weather exceptionally hot, the town centre was suddenly full of people again.
Stephen told me that he was finding it difficult seeing so many young women wearing very little in the summer heat.
He said he couldn’t help looking at them and that his staring sometimes made him feel awkward.
I tried to reassure him.
Finding other people attractive doesn’t disappear simply because you’re in a relationship.
I wasn’t expecting Stephen to become blind.
I told him that noticing attractive women was perfectly natural. He just needed to make sure he wasn’t staring in a way that made anyone uncomfortable.
Then he told me something that was much harder for me to dismiss.
My son’s girlfriend was living with us at the time.
She was young and, because it was exceptionally hot, she sometimes wore shorts and crop tops around the house.
Stephen told me that he found this distracting.
That alarmed me.
This wasn’t an anonymous woman walking through town.
This was my son’s young girlfriend.
She lived in my home.
She needed to feel completely safe there.
I told Stephen that he needed to mentally place her in an entirely different category. She was my son’s girlfriend and young enough to be treated like family. Whatever automatic physical response he might experience, his behaviour towards her needed to reflect that.
I wasn’t sure whether Stephen fully understood what I was trying to say.
And because there were times when the two of them would be alone in the house while I was at work, I quietly spoke to her too.
I told her that if Stephen ever said or did anything that made her feel uncomfortable, she must tell me.
She reassured me that everything was fine.
Stephen hadn’t done anything to concern her.
I was relieved.
But the fact that I’d felt it necessary to have the conversation troubled me.
As August approached, I felt increasingly exhausted.
Only weeks earlier, I’d been joyfully clearing drawers and wardrobe space, imagining breakfast together, dinner after work and the beginning of our ordinary domestic life.
Instead, I was watching Stephen struggle with the job we’d both been so excited about.
He was agitated.
He was smoking heavily.
He was drinking when he should have been working.
He was complaining about his training.
He seemed increasingly distracted and disengaged.
And somehow, alongside all of that, other women had suddenly become a recurring subject in our relationship.
J.
Women in town.
My son’s girlfriend.
And, inevitably, my mind sometimes returned to his ex and the bed he’d promised not to share.
I didn’t know what any of it meant.
Perhaps it meant nothing.
Perhaps I was becoming oversensitive because my trust had already been shaken.
Perhaps Stephen was simply struggling with his mental health and needed some time to settle.
Thankfully, he had two weeks’ holiday approaching.
For the first week, he would be going to the Lake District with his father and his sons on their annual family trip.
I knew I would miss him.
But for the first time since we’d met, I also found myself looking forward to being apart.
I needed some space.
Only a few weeks earlier, I’d thought Stephen moving in would mark the beginning of the life we’d been waiting for.
Instead, as I watched him prepare to leave for the Lake District, I found myself hoping that a little distance might somehow bring the man I’d fallen in love with back to me.
