The notebook is open on my knee, pen cap between my teeth, and I'm three items into a list that has no business being this long when my phone lights up on the pillow. His name on the screen, and my thumb hovers like I’m deciding whether to touch a stove that is on.
I pick up, because apparently self-preservation is a skill I never acquired. "What." Graceful as ever—the Odette Marsden charm offensive, alive and well.
"How was your day?" Liam’s voice is careful, rehearsed on the first word and losing its grip by the last. The sound settles somewhere behind my sternum, warm and deeply unwelcome.
"I served fish and chips to a man who complained the chips were too chippy." I pull my knees up and press my back against the headboard. "Whatever that means. So—eventful."
He laughs—not the polished version from company dinners, real and cracking at the edges. My heart does something I'm going to pretend didn't happen, and I press the pen cap harder between my teeth.
"What are you doing right now?" The question is too simple, and I don't trust simple from a man whose last simple question ended with his mouth on mine.
"Writing lists." I glance down at the heading in capitals that took me three attempts. "It's what I do when the alternative is thinking—well. You know all that."
"What's tonight's list?" Soft, curious, the tone he used on Sunday mornings when he'd find me cross-legged on the kitchen floor surrounded by notebooks and cold tea.
"Reasons I Hate You." I say it flat, because flat is the only delivery that won't crack my voice. The silence on his end stretches three full seconds—I count them against my pulse.
"What's on it?" Quieter now, stripped of rehearsal. My fingers tighten on the pen until the plastic digs grooves into my skin.
"Number one—you always said 'I understand' when you clearly didn't, and three days later you'd prove it." The pen moves across the page as I read, tracing lines I wrote an hour ago with steadier hands.
"Number three—you never learned how to fold a fitted sheet and pretended that was charming instead of pathological." My voice is doing its best impression of controlled, which is a generous description.
"What happened to number two?" A thread of warmth in his voice, and I bite the pen cap so hard it splits. Number two is you gave me a baby and don't know it exists, and the ink bled through where I pressed too hard.
"Number two is private." I swallow, and the sound carries more than I want it to. "Number five—you kissed my forehead in my room like I was something fragile instead of someone you'd just wrecked."
The line goes so quiet I check the screen to see if he's still there. His breathing comes through thin and uneven, and my hand moves to my stomach under the notebook.
"Is there a corresponding list?" His voice has gone somewhere raw. I close my eyes, and the admission costs more than the entire hate list combined.
"It's longer. Significantly." Neither of us speaks for a beat, and the word sits between our phones like a stone at the bottom of the lake.
"That's not fair, Odette." My name in his mouth through a phone speaker at eleven at night, and my whole body remembers what it was like to hear it in the dark beside him.
"None of this is fair, Liam. Fair left the building somewhere around the bridal suite, and it hasn't sent a forwarding address."
The conversation shifts—I hear it in his breathing first, the way it changes weight. "I can't stop thinking about your room. Your hands on my belt—the sound the buckle made when you started to pull it through."
My eyes close and the memory arrives uninvited—his skin under my palms, the metal cold against my fingers, his forehead dropping to my collarbone. "Liam, don't."
"I replay it every night and every night I choose differently." His voice is raw, the careful diction dissolved entirely. "Do you wish I hadn't stopped?"
The question arrives and my hand presses harder against my stomach as if the baby might hear this and judge us both. "Do you?"
Silence—long enough that I can hear him breathing, in through his nose, out through his mouth, the pattern from his gym sessions. "Every single night." Three words, barely voiced, and my spine meets the headboard because my body needs something solid.
I press my palm over my eyes. The dark behind my hand is the only place I can survive this sentence, and even there it follows me.
"Tell me about Callum." His voice steadies, a man gripping a railing. "Not to punish myself—I just need to know who’s around you."
"He's kind, he's present." I open my eyes and stare at the ceiling crack that looks like Italy. "He doesn't make me feel like a problem that needs solving—just hands me tea, tells a story about swimming to France, and doesn't ask why I'm crying into my toast."
"That sounds like the opposite of me." The laugh that comes through is short and airless, a man confirming a diagnosis he already suspected.
"That's exactly the problem." My voice comes out quieter than I planned, and the words sit between our phones like something that should have stayed inside my mouth.
"Do you love him?" Direct, no padding. My pulse hammers against the phone I'm pressing too hard to my ear.
"I don't know." The lie is automatic. "That's not true—I do know, I just can't say it out loud when both answers destroy something."
His exhale is long and shaking, and I hear the mattress shift on his end. "I'm coming back this weekend—Celine's got a doctor's appointment, she doesn't need me there."
"You shouldn't come." My fingers curl into the duvet, gathering fabric into my fist. "There's nothing here that isn't already broken."
"I know. I'm coming anyway." The certainty in his voice constricts my chest while I’m lying in a bed above a man who texts I'll be here and means it.
"Why?" The word is barely a whisper, and I hate how much I need the answer, how my body leans toward the phone as if distance is the only problem.
"Because you told me evidence isn't everything." His breathing fills the line, and my chest splits along a seam I thought had already opened as far as it could go. "And I haven't slept through a single night since."
The screen goes dark. I don't remember who hangs up first—only the quiet afterward, and my hand still pressed to a stomach carrying a secret that gets heavier with every call.
Below me, through the floorboards—the drums. Callum, playing on the other side of the floor I've spent the last hour whispering another man's name through. The rhythm is steady and warm and faithful in a way I have not earned.
I pick up the pen. New page, fresh heading, capitals pressed so deep the paper tears. Things That Can't Go On. Two names on it and no answers, and below me the drums keep playing for a woman who doesn't deserve them.