The Heart Broke In by James Meek

paper. Val took it, opened the flap, looked inside, stuck out his lower lip, closed the envelope, folded it in two and tucked it in his inside jacket pocket. He leaned one elbow on the bar and linked the fingers of his hands together. His shoulders quivered. He couldn’t meet Bec’s eyes.
    ‘I’ve behaved badly,’ said Bec. ‘I’m sorry.’
    Val looked up and swallowed. For a moment, he seemed unsure of himself. It became him.
    ‘When I met you, there were so many people around youwanting your attention, and all the same you seemed lonely,’ said Bec. ‘They looked up to you, or they were jealous of you, or they were afraid of you, and you were still lonely. You were carrying a loss, and I admired how you tried to hide it. You were …’ She groped for a word to describe a man hollowed out by grief who doesn’t become addicted to it, or to the pity of others, and who remains loyal to life. ‘… dignified,’ she said.
    ‘Go on,’ said Val. Bec could see his uncertainty skinning over. She remembered how he liked to talk about his young teenage children. He found more about them to say than was worth telling, as if fending off the temptation to impress her with anecdotes about famous people he knew. She realised Val had been prepping her for a life of shared responsibility all along; a life of cohabitation with the quiet, evasive kids, for whom Val’s determination not to spoil them had been, with its intermittent blasts of overwhelming attention, a kind of spoiling. He’d assumed from the start that they were moving towards marriage, and the children, perhaps, had assumed the same thing, which was why they were so quiet and evasive.
    Her eyes slipped to the knot of Val’s tie. She’d taken pleasure in moving his ties to one side, unfastening the second button of his shirt and sliding her hand over his chest. The memory seemed like a story she’d been told rather than something she’d done.
    It was as if just by staring at her and keeping perfectly still he was forcing her mouth shut and making it hard for her to breathe. The knowledge that death had broken into Val’s house and slowly killed his wife, and that he hadn’t crumbled and had guarded his children, had made her interested in him and given her a feeling of kinship. It didn’t seem to her thatshe’d dealt well with death when it came early to her family. His grief had hooked her and his assumption of power had turned her on. It satisfied a need for abasement. Several months earlier, when she’d kneeled in front of him in a half-lit room and taken him in her mouth, she felt power, mercy and humiliation running through her and mixing in a single delicious stream.
    A waitress came over to tell them that their table was ready.
    ‘We won’t be needing it,’ said Val. ‘I’ll have a bottle of mineral water, still, no ice, no lemon.’ He turned to Bec. She saw herself reflected in his face: a cold, hard, trivial woman.
    ‘It was wrong of you to take my wife’s ring if you didn’t want to marry me,’ said Val.
    ‘It was wrong,’ said Bec gratefully. ‘I should have said no. I was a coward. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I didn’t think.’
    Val pinched the creases of his trousers and pulled them straight. ‘Do you remember telling me about your father?’ he said. ‘Do you remember telling me how he died when he could have stayed alive by betraying some shit, and how his children had to try harder than most people to do the right thing? Here.’ He gave Bec a napkin and she wiped the tears from her face. ‘I’m making this too easy for you by letting you hate me.’ He got up, seemed about to walk away, sat down again and pulled his chair closer to Bec.
    ‘You’ve been saying “yes” to everything I asked for six months,’ he said. ‘You’ve met somebody else and you don’t have the guts to admit it.’
    ‘I haven’t met anybody. I said yes before because you asked me and I liked making you happy. I said yes to