Excerpt from Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I can't.

Not now.

I pull my hand away.

Pick up a lip salve.

Close the drawer.

No more.

Lucy has sent me a message. A picture of a fox's penis. Barbed! Bloody barbed! Patriarchy and biology are in cahoots. This is the only way we really communicate now. Animal cocks and faux feminism. I send her an article about duck rape and sit on the edge of the bed and don't think about the box.

The box the box the box.

JP is trying to find the cat. His voice is stretching the vowels of the cat's name and every shout bounces through the flat and through my head. Now I can't think what else I need to pack. Outside, there's the hiss of the double decker and the shouts from the burst of children just released from the school gates. The rumble of the train line and now the endless shouting for the cat who will be hiding under the sofa like always. Where else would he be? Why does it matter?

Seeeedneeeey. Seeeedneeeey.

There you are!

JP's voice is full of delight and wonder and the cat was under the sofa. For a second I think how it must be to live in a world where you can find genuine joy in an entirely predictable moment. Uncomplicated. Easy. Frictionless.

JP and I are very different people.

He is wonderful and sometimes that fact feels like a barb.

I try to wrap the handles of the canvas bags around the red case and they hang and twist. The whole thing becomes impossible to move. There are six flights of stairs between me and the ground floor. Grayslipped pavement stretching toward the tube. Escalators. Corridors. Underground. I want to get into bed.

I've only just managed to get out of bed.

* * *

JP gives me his gym bag and a lift to the train station. He brushes his hand across the back of my neck and I flinch and pull away and his face pulls down. He takes a breath. He tells me he and Sidney will miss me. He's proud of me. This is a good step forward. The right thing to do. He'll make bouillabaisse when I'm back, with the proper fish from the fishmonger who gets it from Billingsgate, not just whatever Sainsbury's has vacuum-packed and yellow-stickered.

Sidney can have the heads he grins and I want to smile back at him. I want to be back where we were. He is trying. But I can't. I think of all those little headless rainbow bodies lying on our plastic worktops. Bones ripped from flesh. I swallow a mouthful of acid saliva.

JP I start but I can't shape the words and he doesn't want to hear them. He wants to tie us to a future together with fish stew and the bloody cat. I want to pull at the seams.

Don't.

His voice is a little boy's.

The sound sticks in my heart.

So I don't. I sew myself up instead.

I will go to her if you like JP says and I know he's rehearsed the words. He's too good and it's awful and I wish I'd never met him and that none of this had ever happened. It is hard to believe that everything was once so easy, so simple. Look at us now.

That's fine I say. You don't need to. She wouldn't know. She won't know. It's a month. She's got that nice carer, activities. Puzzles. Zumba. Gymnastics. Nuclear fission.

JP smiles uncertainly and I show my teeth to show it's a joke, it's all just a joke. It's just not funny.

And when you are back perhaps we can talk about what we do with—but I throw the door open before he can finish. Don't say it. He grabs my hand and I let him. I squeeze it so tightly I feel the dull grind of his tendons. I press it against my forehead as if my desperate mind will push my thoughts through our bones. I love you, I think. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

And I get out of the car and I'm swallowed up by the mouth of the station and I try to leave it all behind and there are ghosts all around me.

* * *

The train empties out as it curls further and further away from the places people want to be. I read a book. I don't understand a word of it. It seems an impossible thing, to be able to create one of these. All those ideas. Fitted together on a page. Life happening in the right order. Moments constructed from fragments of feelings. Building toward something. How does anyone ever do it? It's ridiculous.

Excerpted from Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen. Copyright © 2026 by Katya Balen. Excerpted by permission of HarperVia. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.