I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers Read Free Book Online

international stories herself.
    Twice a week, when Caroline travelled into the Sightline offices to attend forward planning and development meetings, Michael was woken by the gruff engine of their faded red Volvo filtering into his sleep. Ten hours later her return was heralded by its headlights sweeping the hedges. For the rest of the week Caroline worked at home, editing scripts, making calls, and viewing cuts downstairs on the kitchen table.
    The majority of Sightline’s work dealt with issues in the South West. Half-hour investigations following the local news: slave labour among immigrant work gangs, care home abuses in Bath, the environmental battles over the Severn Estuary barrage. Occasionally a local story would provoke national interest: a study by Bristol University into pesticides and the declining bee population, the story of a Devon family’s fight for their father’s right to die. When it did, it was Caroline’s job to work with the development team and chase the larger budgets of a network commission.

    None of it satisfied her, and Michael knew it. The few times Sightline asked her to oversee a shoot, or whenever she set one up herself, Michael could sense the change in her as soon as she came through the door, her shoulders slung with cameras and bags of tape. It would stay with her through the night, as they ate, read by the fire, or watched TV. He would feel it emanating off her as she nestled into him. Even in bed, it felt at times as if their lovemaking was vitalised by her having tasted her old reporting life again.
    When Michael asked her about it, she’d reassured him that this was what she’d wanted. It was she who’d suggested they move out of London. And she who’d said she had to put a stop to her travelling, to change her life from peripatetic to rooted. It would be fine, she told him. She just needed to get used to the different pressure points, the new rhythms of their lives. The foreign fieldwork, she’d explained to him one morning in bed, it had been like a drug. That was all. But she was coming off it now. For them, but mostly for herself.
―
    Their first winter at Coed y Bryn was long, arriving with a sudden October frost furring the fields and icing the trees, before dragging on through to snow flurries in April. Despite the weather, or perhaps because of it, it was over these months that Caroline took to climbing the hill behind the cottage on her own. There was no mobile reception inside the house and Michael noticed she’d begun taking her phone with her on these walks. It hadn’t worried him. He’d sensed no waning in her feelings for him. If anything, their relationship, still young, was only strengthening. Their life was finding its pattern, both mutual and independent. Ever since he was a teenager Michael had lived with a low-grade hum of concern that he would never be able to love. Not fully, beyond the initial attraction. Not with all of his past and all of his future as well as his present. But with every day together at Coed y Bryn, Caroline was proving him wrong.

―
    She was preparing dinner when she told him.
    “We got that commission,” she said from the kitchen. “Pete told us today.”
    She was chopping vegetables, the tap of her knife on the wooden cutting board steady and quick.
    Michael was editing a chapter at the table. “That’s great,” he said without looking up. “Network?”
    It was late April and the evening beyond the French windows still held a hint of the day’s light. The previous autumn, without telling Caroline, Michael had planted an arcing C of daffodil bulbs at the top of the lawn. The letter had shown itself in March, before pausing in the spring frosts, the tall stems still budded. Only the previous week had it finally thickened into the bright yellow of full bloom.
    “Yes,” Caroline said. “Transmission in October. If we can make it work.”
    “And can you?” Michael struck his pen through a paragraph and turned the