Chapter 2: First Day of School
The scent of yesterday’s cafeteria pizza was a permanent fixture in the assembly hall. Yaa stood by her class’s designated square of scuffed floor, one hand gently resting on the shoulder of a wailing Amelia who missed her mum, the other subtly pressing a tissue into the hand of Leo, who was, as ever, a walking snot-faucet. Monday morning. The buzzing fluorescent lights, the squeak of small shoes on polished wood, the discordant chorus of whispered complaints and random giggles—it was the usual chaotic symphony. But today, it all felt like it was happening through a thick pane of glass.
Her body ached in unfamiliar places. A pleasant, deep-seated throb that would normally bring a flush to her cheeks, now just felt like evidence. She’d spent the entire weekend replaying it. The weight of him. The rough command in his voice. Then the cold stillness of the hotel room at dawn, and that photo. The judgment she’d flung at him before fleeing. A hot shame coiled in her stomach whenever she thought about it. She’d made assumptions. Big, dramatic, novel assumptions.
“Just one latecomer,” Sumaya, her new teaching assistant, murmured beside her, checking her clipboard. “Oliver Riley. Transferred in last minute. File’s thin.”
Yaa nodded, tuning back into the room. “We’ll be ready for him. Fresh start.”
Principal Patel’s droning voice filled the high-ceilinged room, a lecture on ‘Trying Our Best’ that was losing the attention of every five-year-old by the second. Yaa’s own smile felt plastered on. She was mentally organizing the morning’s painting station when the heavy double doors at the back boomed open, hitting the wall with a crack that silenced even Patel.
A little boy stood framed in the doorway, clutching a dinosaur backpack that was almost as big as he was. His face was pale, his eyes wide and flooded with panic. And behind him, blotting out the light from the hallway, was a man. A towering shape in a plain black jumper and jeans, one large hand on the boy’s shoulder. He wore a disposable black face mask, a common enough sight, but it hid everything below those sharp, familiar blue-gray eyes.
Time didn’t slow down. It snapped.
Yaa’s breath vanished. The ache in her body flared into a live wire. Her professional smile froze, then died.
It was him.
Simon.
His eyes swept the room, a soldier’s assessing glance, and landed on the class designations. On her. They locked onto hers. She saw the recognition hit him with a physical force. His shoulders stiffened. The hand on his son’s shoulder tightened, almost imperceptibly.
Principal Patel recovered first. “Ah! Our new joiner. You must be Oliver. And you’re…?”
“Riley,” Simon said, his voice muffled by the mask but unmistakably that low, Manchester rumble. It vibrated straight through her. “His father.”
“Come down the front, Oliver, don’t be shy! You’re with Miss Mensah’s class.”
The little boy, Oliver, didn’t move. He was trembling, on the verge of full-blown tears. Simon knelt, a surprisingly graceful movement for such a big man, bringing his face level with his son’s. He spoke too softly for anyone else to hear, his eyes crinkling slightly above the mask. Reassuring. Tender. The sight was a sucker punch to Yaa’s gut.
This was the ‘bad person’? This giant, gently coaxing his terrified child into a room full of strangers?
Oliver nodded, a tiny, jerky movement. Simon stood up and nudged him forward gently. Oliver began the long, lonely walk down the central aisle, small shoulders hunched. Simon’s eyes followed him, then lifted and found Yaa’s again. An unreadable, intense stare. A challenge? An apology? A warning?
Her teacher’s instinct kicked in, overriding the screaming in her head. She took a few quick steps forward, bending at the knees to meet Oliver as he reached the front.
“Hello, Oliver,” she said, her voice miraculously steady and warm. “I’m so glad you’re here. We’ve been waiting for you. Would you like to stand next to me until we go to our classroom?”
Oliver looked up at her, his big eyes searching hers. He gave another small nod. He didn’t let go of his backpack strap, but he shuffled closer to her. She offered him her hand, and after a hesitation, his small, cold fingers slipped into hers.
When she looked back up, Simon was gone. The doorway was empty. A quiet dismissal, just like in the hotel room. But the space where he’d stood felt charged, like the air after lightning.
The rest of assembly was a blur. She led her line of ducklings—Oliver clinging to her side—back to their classroom, the bright colors and cheerful clutter somehow feeling false. Sumaya shot her a curious glance. “You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Just a Monday,” Yaa muttered, helping Leo hang up his coat.
The morning unfolded in a cascade of routine miracles and minor catastrophes. Oliver didn’t speak. He sat where placed, watched everything with those serious, watchful eyes, and completed tasks with a quiet, startling precision. When they did free painting, he didn’t make a wild abstract splatter. He drew three neat stick figures. A tall one, a smaller one in a dress, and a little one in the middle. He painted the tall one’s hair yellow.
Yaa’s heart hammered against her ribs. She had to look away.
At lunch, she was supervising the hand-washing queue when a shadow fell across the corridor. She didn’t need to turn. She felt him.
Simon stood by the classroom door, mask still on, holding Oliver’s forgotten lunch box. He was looking at Oliver’s painting, pinned on the ‘New Artists’ wall.
She walked over, her sensible flats silent on the linoleum. Every step felt dangerous.
“He forgot this,” Simon said, his voice flat. He held out the lunch box, a generic blue thing.
“Thank you.” She took it. Their fingers didn’t touch. The silence between them was a physical wall. “He’s settling in well. He’s very focused.”
Simon just nodded, his eyes still on the painting. “He likes structure.”
Another silence. The sounds of children laughing in the lunch hall echoed down the hallway.
“Simon…” she started, the name feeling forbidden on her tongue.
His eyes cut to hers, sharp. “Don’t.”
“I just… I owe you an apology. For how I left. The things I assumed.”
He let out a short, hard breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You assumed right. Just not in the way you thought.” He finally looked at her, really looked, and the intensity was stripped bare now. It wasn’t anger. It was a deep, weary resignation. “This is my mess. You don’t want to step in it.”
“I’m his teacher,” she said softly, firmly. “I’m already in it.”
A flicker of something—pain, maybe—crossed his eyes. He gave one last, slow look around the colourful, cramped classroom, a world so alien to him. His gaze settled back on her, traveling over her face, her practical sweater, her pinned-up braids. It was a different kind of look than the one in the bar. Softer, heavier, full of a complication they both now understood was immense.
“Look after him,” he said, the words rough. Not a request. A plea from a man who never pleaded.
Then he turned and walked away, his long strides eating up the hallway. She stood there, holding a child’s lunch box, watching the broad back of the man who had wrecked her and rebuilt her in a single night disappear around a corner.
The afternoon was a test of endurance. Every time Oliver smiled shyly at a puzzle, every time he carefully wiped his gluey fingers, she saw Simon’s hands. The hands that had pinned her, touched her, held his son with such care.
When the final bell rang, she helped Oliver into his coat. He was one of the last to be collected. They waited by the classroom door before Simon showed up again, picking up his son and leaving almost immediately. Yaa could feel the sting of his back, Oliver glancing back to her.
As she gathered her things, her eyes fell on Oliver's drawing.
On the back, in hesitant, teacher-guided letters, he had written his name. Oliver. And beneath it, he had tried to write something else. A wobbly, phonetic attempt. She squinted at it, sounding it out.
“DADDYISSONICE.”
Yaa closed the folder. She switched off the lights, locked the door, and walked out into the ordinary afternoon, carrying the weight of a secret that was no longer just hers.
She switched off the lights, locked the door, and walked out into the ordinary afternoon, carrying the weight of a secret that was no longer just hers. The secret pressed down, a physical ache behind her ribs that the cheerful, sepia-toned light of the pub did nothing to ease. She had her face buried in her hands atop a sticky table, shaking her head slowly as the hum of Monday evening conversations swirled around her.
“I’m an idiot, Zoe. A monumental, judgmental idiot.”
On the other side of the table, Zoe and Suni, the school’s music teacher, exchanged a glance. Suni had been the one to drag Yaa out after the staff meeting, insisting she needed a large glass of wine and the whole story.
“Okay, but hear me out,” Suni said, leaning forward. “I had dinner with Brenda from reception last night. She processes all the files. Your man Oliver’s dad is a soldier. A single father. Partial custody, I think. The mother on file, some woman named Nichole, has barely returned a call. Brenda says he’s been in twice already, sorting uniform vendors and meal plans, asking all the right questions.”
Yaa peeked through her fingers. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying,” Suni continued, sipping her cider, “that according to school admin gossip, which is basically gospel, Simon Riley is an amazing fucking father. And you took one look at a kid’s photo and assumed he was a cheating bastard.”
Zoe grinned, tipping her wine glass in salute. “Classic Yaa. Leaping to the worst possible conclusion in a record-breaking guilt spiral.”
“I can’t believe you actually did it,” Suni whispered, awe in her voice. “You talked to the giant. You unleashed that. And you’re still alive. The maths isn’t mathsing.”
“She’s tougher than she looks,” Zoe said, cracking up. “I take full credit for the unleashing, by the way. Best birthday present ever.”
Yaa dropped her hands, her expression bleak. “It doesn’t matter. I fucked up. I saw a family and constructed a whole telenovela in my head. The way I left... the things I must have made him feel.” The memory of his flat, resigned voice in the classroom hallway echoed. You don’t want to step in it.
“So you fumbled the exit,” Zoe shrugged, swirling her wine. “Big deal. It’s not the end of the world. You have a whole school year to fix the misunderstanding. You’re literally his kid’s teacher. You have a built-in excuse to be... civil.”
“Civil,” Yaa repeated, the word tasting like ash. She thought of the way he’d looked at her in the bar, all heat and promise, compared to the shut-down, guarded man in the school corridor. She doubted civil was even on the table.
Across the city, the scent of cheap tuna bake and overcooked peas filled Simon’s small, functional kitchen. Oliver sat at the table, kicking his legs, a torrent of words finally freed from the quiet boy of the classroom.
“...and then Leo spilled all the glitter, Miss Mensah said ‘oh goodness’ but she wasn’t cross, she laughed, and we used the dustpan to get it back but it’s still everywhere…” Oliver took a big bite, chewing enthusiastically. “She’s proper nice, Dad. She helped me spell ‘dinosaur’.”
Simon nodded, pushing food around his own plate. His appetite was gone. “Good. That’s her job, mate.”
“She smells like sweets. And she gave me the blue apron for painting. Not the pink one.”
“That was decent of her.” He took a swig of water, the domestic ordinariness of the scene a stark contrast to the warzone in his head. Every word Oliver said was a tiny, brutal incision. Nice. Laughed. Proper nice. It painted a picture of a woman he desperately wanted to know in the daylight, one that aligned perfectly with the passionate, warm woman he’d known in the dark.
Oliver’s chatter was a lifeline and a torture. It only made him want to start over again. To walk up to the school gates and say something, anything, that wasn’t loaded with this awful, heavy history. To ask her out for a coffee where they could just be Simon and Yaa, without the ghosts of his mistakes or her assumptions between them.
But he couldn’t.
It was just sex. Amazing, obliterating, unforgettable sex. But it had to be. The tangled wreck of his past with Nichole was a minefield. The imminent return to his unit was a looming cliff edge. His life was a series of temporary postings and prolonged absences, punctuated by fierce, focused bouts of fatherhood. There was no space for a relationship, especially not with someone as fundamentally good as Oliver’s teacher seemed to be.
To introduce something so fragile into this chaos was unfair. To her, and to Oliver, who was already attached. To protect himself from wanting what he couldn’t have, or to protect her from the inevitable disappointment of him, he couldn’t tell her any of this. He couldn’t explain the scars, the schedule, the constant low-grade fear that he was failing his son just by the nature of his job.
He watched Oliver carefully scrape his plate clean.
“All done, champ.”
“Can I watch telly?”
“Half an hour. Then bath.”
As Oliver scrambled into the front room, the silence in the kitchen expanded. Simon pulled out his phone, a stupid, impulsive move. His thumb hovered over the sparse contacts. He didn’t have her number. He had nothing.
He had a school email address for “Miss Mensah” on a letter about parent-teacher consultations next month. He stared at it, the glowing text in the dim kitchen. A direct, professional line to her.
He could type something. An apology for his bluntness in the hallway. A clarification. A beginning.
He typed three words: About the other…
He deleted them. The chasm felt too wide to bridge with keystrokes. He put the phone down, screen-first, and listened to the canned laughter from the television, a sound that somehow made the quiet, lonely flat feel even quieter.
He put the phone down, screen-first, and listened to the canned laughter from the television, a sound that somehow made the quiet, lonely flat feel even quieter. The next morning, and every morning that week, he walked Oliver to school with a knot in his stomach the size of a fist.
The first week of school was a volatile mix of giggles and screaming, glue mishaps and sudden nap-time tears. Through it all, Yaa kept a watchful eye on Oliver, who was slowly, incrementally, getting assimilated into the new crowd. He went from silent observation to sharing his dinosaur facts with Leo, who listened with wide-eyed, snotty admiration. Day by day, the tightness in his small shoulders lessened.
At pickup, Yaa tried to offer that polite, professional smile across the bustling courtyard. Simon’s response was a tight nod, his blue-gray eyes guarded, the same brooding attitude reflected back at her. She thought she’d really fucked up with him, that his coldness was a permanent judgment. She had no idea he was just an awkward, horny mess around her, his brain short-circuiting every time he saw her in her bright cardigans, her braids piled high, looking so devastatingly competent and kind.
“Miss Mensah said my volcano was the best,” Oliver announced that Tuesday evening, pushing peas around his plate.
Simon grunted, taking a swig of beer. The image of Yaa, sweaty and gasping beneath him in that hotel room, flashed unbidden. It was getting ridiculous. She was a recurring topic at the dinner table after school, and it was killing him. He was trying so hard to avoid dragging her into this, to keep things separate and clean, but the visceral memory of fucking the sweet teacher was a recurring, inconvenient loop in his head.
By Thursday, Oliver was laughing openly at another child’s joke during story time. Yaa felt a swell of pride that was immediately punctured by the sight of Simon at the gate, his large frame leaning against the fence, staring at her like she was a puzzle he’d been ordered to dismantle. She looked away first, flustered, pretending to fix a button on Chloe’s coat.
He spent that night pacing his small living room after Oliver was asleep, running a hand over his stubble. He could still smell her in his memory—that mix of sweet lotion and arousal. It was pathetic. He needed it to stop.
On Friday afternoon, as the children bundled their artwork into backpacks, Yaa took a breath. “Oliver, could you ask your dad to pop in for a quick word before you go? Just a routine thing.”
Oliver nodded, darting out. Simon appeared in the doorway a minute later, his expression closed-off, braced for impact. He thought she was gonna insult him, or give him some clinical warning about Oliver’s quietness. The classroom was empty now except for the three of them, smelling of wax crayons and cleaning spray.
“Thanks for coming in,” Yaa said, her voice softer than he remembered. She gestured to a small table where she’d laid out a series of papers. “I just wanted to show you some of Oliver’s work from this week.”
He stepped closer, his eyes scanning the careful drawings, the neatly traced letters, a colorful collage of shapes. “He did this?”
“All of it.” She pointed to a detailed sketch of a stegosaurus. “He’s got a fantastic eye for detail. And see here?” She tapped a worksheet where Oliver had sound-matched every word correctly. “He’s settled in so well. He’s a lovely boy. You’re doing a great job.”
The relief that washed over Simon was physical, a loosening in his chest he hadn’t realized was clamped shut. He let out a slow breath, his shoulders dropping slightly. “Right. Good. That’s… thanks.”
The air between them shifted, just a fraction. The professional barrier felt thinner. Simon finally spoke, the words coming out in a low rush. “His mother, Nichole, she’ll be dropping him off from next week. I’m going back to my base. Deployment.”
Yaa’s smile faltered. She wanted to ask for how long, where, if it was dangerous. She wanted to ask about the woman in the photo, about the logistics of it all. But his face was set, already distant. “I see,” she said instead. “Well. Good luck, then.”
Oliver, who had been quietly coloring at a nearby desk, suddenly knocked over a pot of crayons. They clattered and rolled across the linoleum in a chaotic rainbow. “Oops,” he whispered.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Yaa said automatically. She turned and bent over to gather them, her skirt pulling tight across her curves as she reached under the table.
Simon’s breath caught. The view was a brutal, vivid callback to a different position, a different context. Heat surged through him, immediate and inconvenient. He had to leave. Now.
“We should go,” he said, his voice rougher than intended. He grabbed Oliver’s hand. “Thanks, Miss Mensah.”
He almost pushed Oliver out the door, not looking back, his pulse hammering in his throat. The image of her, bent over in that classroom, seared itself behind his eyelids. He needed to get out of there before he did something stupid, like touch her.