Free I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers Page B

more than a neighbour to Josh and Samantha. Morning greetings, occasional conversations over the hedge dividing his communal garden from their private lawn, glimpses of them emerging from a taxi at night, a streetlight catching their clothes as they passed into the shadows.

    Perhaps there would have been other parties, and maybe at one of them someone else would have performed a similar role to Tony’s that Saturday in November. But Michael doubted it. There are narrow windows for certain beginnings. Multiple strands of personal histories, psychologies, emotions that intersect once only, and then never again. There is, in the end, a time for everything. This is what Michael told himself in the years afterwards. Sometimes in consolation, more often in regret. That however much he tried to unpick those threads, however much he attempted to locate the source moment of what had happened, he could not. There was always another beyond it, connected by the most fragile of strands, but connected still. Time had travelled through all of them—him, Caroline, Samantha, Josh, Lucy, Rachel—and there was nothing they could have done about it. None of their choices had been malign. And yet combined, they’d created darkness more than light.
    For the other residents of South Hill Drive, the nature of Michael’s friendship with Samantha and Josh was difficult to fathom. Viewed from a distance, it seemed both unlikely and imbalanced. Him, a young single widower, reticent with grief, a freelancer adrift on the hours of the day. Them, a young family busy with the tides of life, with the schedules and demands of their shared hours.
    But it wasn’t just the differing makeup of their lives that led others on the street to comment or question. It was also the momentum of their relationship, the speed at which they’d become so intimate following that party. Over the next seven months their involvement in one another’s lives deepened to a degree that all of them had only ever experienced before after a period of years. Within a few weeks Michael and Josh were regularly to be seen leaving of a morning for their jogs on the Heath; when the girls came home from school and nursery they soon got used to Michael joining them in their kitchen, having tea with Samantha or even helping with their homework as she prepared dinner. He and Samantha often met during the days, too, at the cafés edging the Heath or in the canteen of Kenwood House. Three or four times a week, as Josh exited the Tube station in Belsize Park, Michael’s phone would light up with a text on his desk—“Come round for a drink?” By the time it was Christmas it already seemed natural that Michael should join them for lunch, arriving at their back door with an armful of presents for the girls and a bottle of champagne for their parents. All of which puzzled their other neighbours on the street who followed, through windows and rumour, their accelerated friendship. What these neighbours couldn’t appreciate, however, was that the source of their surprise was also its reason. It was exactly because of its newness, its lack of depth, that Michael, Samantha, and Josh had embraced their newfound companionship with the familiarity of years.

    When Michael had first met them that winter, there were already undercurrents pulling at Samantha and Josh’s marriage. In their differing ways, despite apparently having achieved all they’d hoped, both were honeycombed with disappointment. In the last couple of years that internal fragility had begun to show. Josh, Michael came to learn, beyond his public bonhomie, could be spiteful and demeaning to his wife. Samantha, meanwhile, met his outbursts with a deepening silence, an ingrained resentment that increasingly manifested itself in an outward disregard for Josh and his work. They both drank, Samantha for solace and reward, Josh to rediscover the optimism of his youth; to feel the muscle memory of when his life was just that, his. The