Harrowcliff after midnight is a town that has collectively agreed to stop existing. No streetlamps past the chip shop, no cars, just the harbour water slapping against stone like it's trying to get someone's attention and failing.
The pub is dark except for the amber light behind the bar. Callum is on a stool with a glass in his hand, staring at the door like a man who is absolutely not waiting for anyone.
He looks up when I come in. His eyes move across my face the way a person reads a paragraph they already know the ending of, and he sets his glass down without finishing it.
"Tea or something stronger?" He's already reaching for the kettle before I've closed the door, which means the question is decorative.
"Tea." I take the stool beside him because my legs have been driving for three hours and they've formally tendered their resignation. My hands find the bar top and press against the wood, and the solidity of it is the first thing that's made sense since the bathroom doorframe.
He sets the mug in front of me. No milk, no sugar, which is correct, and the fact that he knows this after three weeks does something inconvenient to my throat.
"I went to London." The words come out before I've decided to say them, aimed at the steam curling off the mug. "To see someone. It went badly."
"Okay." He picks up a glass and starts drying it, which is his version of looking away without leaving.
"I don't want to talk about it." My fingers wrap around the mug and the heat is too much and not enough, and I hold on because my hands need a job that isn't shaking.
"Also okay." The cloth moves across the glass in slow circles. He doesn't look at me. He doesn't not look at me. "Have you eaten?"
"I had a—" I stop, because the lie requires remembering the last thing I ate, which was toast at seven this morning before a flat that smelled like his aftershave and my sister's shampoo. "No."
He disappears through the kitchen door. I hear a pan, the fridge, the click of the gas hob, and I sit in the empty pub with my tea and my coat still on and my hand drifting to my stomach under the bar where he can't see.
He comes back with a plate. Scrambled eggs, toast cut diagonally, a sprig of something green I suspect is parsley from a jar and not a garden. He sets it down and picks up another glass.
"You don't have to stay." I pull the plate closer and the eggs are perfect, which is infuriating. "It's past midnight."
"I'm aware of the time, love." He holds the glass up to the light, finds an invisible smudge, and polishes it with more concentration than crystal has ever required. "Some of us have been here since six."
"Then go to bed." I take a bite and the toast is warm and the eggs have butter in them and my body responds to food with a gratitude so aggressive my eyes sting.
"You're eating eggs at half twelve in a coat you haven't taken off, and your mascara's been crying since the M4." He racks the glass and reaches for another. "But sure. Fine."
I eat. He cleans. The silence between us is the one from the beach—the first night, before the sand and the stars and the part where I used his body to avoid a question. Undemanding. Asking nothing and holding everything, and right now it's the only thing between me and the floor.
The plate empties. I push it forward and my body announces that it has been running on spite and petrol for nine hours and would like to file a formal complaint.
"I'm going up." I slide off the stool and my knees remember they exist, which I consider a minor victory given the day's events.
"Odette." His voice catches me three steps from the stairs. I turn, and he's leaning on the bar with both forearms, the cloth over his shoulder.
"If you need anything—my door's open." A beat. "Literally. The lock's been broken since March and I keep forgetting to call the bloke."
The smile is forced out of me by a joke that isn’t a joke, and that’s… Nice. To remember how to smile even if you got punched to the gut a few hours earlier. "Goodnight, Callum."
"Night." He picks up my plate and turns toward the kitchen, and the last thing I see before the stairs take me is the back of his neck, the line of his shoulders, a man carrying a dirty plate like it weighs nothing and everything at once.
The room is cold. I don't turn on the overhead—the harbour light through the curtain is enough to find the bed, the nightstand, the notebook. I sit cross-legged on the duvet with the pen between my teeth and open to a blank page.
THINGS I KNOW NOW The heading writes itself in capitals that press too hard into the paper.
1. Celine was the woman in the photos. The pen moves and my hand is steady, which is a betrayal by a body part I thought was on my side.
2. Celine is pregnant. Liam's. Each word is a brick and I'm building a wall out of facts because facts don't dissolve when you cry on them.
3. Liam is staying with her. Because the baby. Because his code. Because a child deserves a father who shows up. The ink pools at the end of the full stop. I stare at the period until it blurs.
4. I am pregnant. Also Liam's. And completely, spectacularly alone. The pen doesn't hesitate on this one, which is its own kind of cruelty.
Four lines. Four neat little facts stacked on top of each other, and any one of them could shatter the others if I picked the pile up too fast. I press the pen to the page again.
The fifth line takes longer—the ink stops and starts, and my handwriting shifts from neat to something my mother would call a doctor's hand. 5. He would have chosen me, if he knew.
I stare at the line. Then I close the notebook and lie back on the pillow with my coat still on and my shoes still on and one hand pressed to the place where a person is growing who doesn't know any of this yet.
Below me, through the floorboards, the drums start. Steady. Rhythmic. Alive. The pattern Callum plays when he thinks no one is listening—the sound of a man who can't commit to anything except a drum kit he's kept for fifteen years and a woman he feeds at midnight without asking why.
My eyes close. The rhythm fills the room, fills the walls, fills the space between my ribs where the day carved out everything I had left. Beat by beat, the sound lowers my shoulders from my ears and my breathing finds his tempo.
The last thing I think before sleep takes me is that I am lying above a man who doesn't know my secrets, growing a baby whose father doesn't know it exists, in a town I chose because I'd never heard of it—and the drums through the floor are still the safest sound I know.