The drift didn’t happen all at once. That was the strange part. Helen, 48, an architect in Edinburgh, thought back later and couldn’t pinpoint when she’d started reaching for the same grey cardigan four mornings in a row. Or when she’d quietly retired the lipstick she used to wear to client meetings. Or when the perfume bottle her mother had bought her in Florence — the one with the green ribbon round the neck — had become an ornament rather than a thing she actually used.
She wasn’t depressed. That was the puzzle. By most measures, she was fine. The mortgage on the Bruntsfield flat was nearly paid off. The kids were independent — one in Glasgow, the other off in Lisbon doing something with code she’d never fully understood. Her husband, Martin, was decent. Tired, mostly. Distracted, more often. But decent. They’d been married nineteen years.
The Photograph That Started Everything
The first thing that gave her pause was a photograph. Her sister had sent her a snap from a hen weekend in 2008. Helen had stared at it for a full minute. There was a woman in the picture wearing a navy dress, head tipped back laughing, hair styled rather than just brushed back, who looked startlingly like her. Was her, technically. But Helen had no memory of feeling like that woman. Of being someone whose laugh took up space in a room.
She’d put her phone face down on the kitchen counter and stood there listening to the kettle.
How a Woman Learns to Take Up Less Space
What was strange, she’d say later, was that no one had asked her to fade. Martin hadn’t asked. The kids hadn’t asked. Work hadn’t asked. She’d just, somewhere along the way, decided it would be simpler to take up less. Less colour. Less effort. Less expectation. And once she’d started taking up less, she’d lost track of how to stop.
She’d been on Illicit Encounters for three weeks before she answered a single message. She’d told herself, when she signed up, that she just wanted to look. Just to see what was out there. Just to remember that there had been a time when men had paid attention to her in pubs in the West End, and that she hadn’t entirely imagined it.
The man she eventually replied to — Iain, 51, in Stirling, separated for two years on paper but living in different rooms for considerably longer than that — had written something so small she almost dismissed it. Most messages were either too keen or too clinical. His just said: “Your profile sounds like a woman I’d want to sit next to at a dinner party. I don’t have a dinner party. But the offer of a coffee is open.”
That was it.
She read it three times.
When they finally met, six weeks later, in a café off George Street — she’d cancelled twice — she’d done something she hadn’t done in maybe five years. She’d put on the perfume. The Florence one. She’d put on the lipstick. She’d actually looked in the mirror, and adjusted her hair, and decided that the woman looking back wasn’t who she’d been at 28, but wasn’t a stranger either.
Iain noticed. Not in a clumsy way. He didn’t compliment her clothes or her face. He just said, when she sat down, “It’s nice to meet you properly,” and the way he held eye contact for a second longer than necessary made her press her napkin onto her lap to steady her hands.
They talked for two hours. About nothing important. About a Mary Oliver poem he’d read on the train. About a painter she’d been obsessed with at university and hadn’t thought of in twenty years. About whether either of them still believed in long-haul flights. He asked her questions. Proper ones. The kind that required an actual answer, not the conversational equivalent of “fine.”
She got back to the flat that evening and sat in the car for a few minutes before going in. She wasn’t crying. She was just — recalibrating. As though someone had quietly opened a window in a room she hadn’t realised had grown stuffy.
What surprised Helen, she’d tell us later, wasn’t the affair itself. It was that turning up for herself again — the perfume, the lipstick, the questions she still found interesting — had nothing really to do with Iain. He’d just been the one who’d noticed. And once she’d been noticed, even for an hour over a flat white, she couldn’t quite go back to standing in the same grey cardigan, listening to the kettle, accepting that this was how the rest of it was going to go.
Some women come to Illicit Encounters looking for something dramatic. Helen wasn’t one of them. She came looking for the woman in the navy dress, head tipped back, laughing.
She found her, eventually. Quietly. In a café off George Street.
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