He Sat Down and Told Me My Own Week

He sat down across the table from me on a half-empty train, uninvited, when there were plenty of other seats, and I did the British thing of resenting it in silence and looking pointedly out of the window. Then he started talking, and I stopped looking out of the window.

He told me about my week. Not fished for it — told it. He began with Monday's meeting, naming the project, the tension in the room, the colleague who'd undermined me; he described it as though he'd been there, in specific detail, the wrong-coloured slides, the thing my boss said. I assumed, coldly, that we'd met, that I'd forgotten him, that he knew my work somehow. Then he moved to Wednesday, to an argument I'd had with my partner, at home, behind a closed door, that no one else on earth had witnessed — the subject of it, the thing I'd said that I regretted, the way it had ended unresolved. He told it to me gently, like a man reminding me of something, and my skin went cold.

He knew about the decision. The big one, the private one, the thing I'd been turning over all week and told absolutely no one, not my partner, not a friend, not a diary — a choice about my future I was carrying alone. He described it. He described both options as I'd weighed them, in my own framing, using a phrase I'd used only inside my own head. And then he told me which one I was going to choose, kindly, as a matter of fact, not a prediction but a report, the way you'd tell someone the score of a match they'd missed.