[Odette’s POV]
His arm is heavy across my waist, and for a handful of seconds the world is just this—cedar and warmth and the slow rhythm of his breathing against my shoulder blade. My body has forgotten it's supposed to be at war.
The ceiling is cracked in the shape of something that might be Italy. I am studying it longer than I should, enjoying the quiet, because I haven’t woken without dread in weeks. Then my phone buzzes on the nightstand and Italy fractures down the middle.
I slide out from under Callum's arm one millimetre at a time, holding my breath. He shifts, mutters something into the pillow that might be my name or might be a beer order, and stays under.
The screen is bright enough to sear. Liam—because the universe is cruel like that. I don’t find it funny in the slightest, but the universe doesn’t seem to care.
I need to see you. Not with Celine there—I need to explain properly. His words glow in the dark, and I didn’t agree to receive summons like these.
I take the phone to the bathroom and turn the shower on. The water drowns everything except his words, which I read three times while sitting on the toilet lid with my knees pulled up. He owes me a career he doesn't know I destroyed, and I owe him a pregnancy test he's never going to see.
My thumbs hover. Nothing comes out—not even in text form, which is a new personal low. I turn the shower off, dry my hands on his towel, and slip back into the dark bedroom.
Callum is on his stomach, one arm flung across my side, his face turned toward where I was. Without the grin and the stories—mouth soft, unguarded, as if sleep is the only place he stops performing.
I could choose this. The pub, the drums through the floor, the man who doesn't ask questions.
My hand moves to my stomach under the sheet. The baby doesn't care about my options—it's Liam's, and building anything honest with Callum on top of that is just another version of masochism.
I dress in the dark. My bra is draped over a drumstick on his nightstand, which is either rock and roll or a health hazard. One last look at his back rising and falling, and I pull the door shut so quietly the hinges don't creak.
The morning shift fills with regulars and plates and the kind of work that I almost could make my new norm. I carry glasses, pour pints, smile at people who don't know my name ran in six papers.
My phone buzzes at half ten. Liam again—I'm driving down, there by afternoon—and my hand goes to the counter while the other drifts to my stomach, two instincts pulling in opposite directions.
"You all right, love?" Bev, pub’s manager and occasionally everyone else, leans through the kitchen hatch, her face so disapproving it could strip wallpaper. "You've been holding that glass for two minutes."
"Brilliant. I just remembered I forgot to defrost the scones." I set the glass down and force my hands to move.
"We don't serve scones." Her eyebrows climb toward her hairline.
"Exactly the kind of oversight I'm talking about." She stares at me. I stare at Gerald's empty glass. The conversation dies with the dignity it deserves.
At noon, another buzz—Don't run, I just want to talk—and don't run is rich, as if running is a hobby I picked up, like crochet or birdwatching. I type don't come and delete it letter by letter, because the lie would be bigger than the text.
Callum appears at one, hair damp, grin loaded. He takes his place behind the bar and pours himself a coffee with the easy, relaxed movement, that reflect the fact that he has no idea what's driving toward his pub.
"You left early." He says it to the coffee machine, not to me, and the casualness is a performance I recognise because I'm giving the same one.
"Couldn't sleep." My cloth moves across the bar in useless circles. "Shift started at seven."
"Right. And I always wake up this refreshed after four hours." He takes a sip, watching me over the rim. "You look like you're solving a murder."
"The scone situation. Very serious. Bev's involved now." I scrub a spot that doesn't exist, because eye contact means answering questions he hasn’t asked yet.
"Odette." His voice drops the grin, drops the performance, drops everything except a steadiness that makes my ribs ache. "Talk to me."
"Nothing to talk about." I pick up Gerald's glass and walk it to the sink. "Weird morning, that's all."
"You didn't eat the cod." He says it gently, and the gentleness is worse than confrontation because it tells me he's been paying attention—and a man paying attention is three questions away from the truth.
"Maybe I ate the cod spiritually." I run water over the glass until my reflection warps. "Maybe the cod and I had a moment."
"You're hilarious." He puts both forearms on the bar and leans forward. "And you're deflecting, and I'm letting you, and we're both pretending I don't know that."
"Thank you for letting me." I turn from the sink and meet his eyes, and whatever he reads in mine makes his jaw shift. "I just need today to be normal. Can you give me that?"
"Normal is literally all I've got." He picks up a glass and starts drying it. "You want normal, you came to the right pub. Ask anyone—four stars, mostly fictional."
I smile. The lunch crowd thins. I am wiping the same table for the fourth time—rehearsing a conversation I'll never have, counting how many steps it takes to reach the door if I need to run—when the daylight in the entrance changes.
Liam stands in the doorway of Callum's pub. His shirt is creased from three hours in a car, stubble dark on a jaw he hasn't bothered to shave. The skin under his eyes is the colour of a bruise that never got around to healing.
Behind me, ceramic meets wood—Callum setting down his cup with a care that tells me he's already reading the room. The sound fills every corner the daylight just vacated.
"Odette." Liam's voice is careful and wrecked simultaneously, a man who rehearsed in the car and forgot every word at the threshold. His eyes move from my face to the man behind the bar and back.
"You said you weren't coming." The cloth tightens in my fist, and that’s a lie, because I should’ve reworded it. You said you’re choosing her. But I can’t say that, not right now and right here, with Callum behind the bar.
"I said I was done sitting." He takes one step inside, and the door swings shut behind him, cutting the daylight. "You never replied."
"That was the reply." My pulse is in my temples and my stomach and the hand gripping the cloth, and behind me I can feel Callum's attention without turning—a shift in the air, a loaded silence.
Liam's mouth opens, and whatever he's about to say is going to land in a room that is not big enough for the three of us and every secret I'm carrying.