[Liam’s POV]
I wake to the absence of her weight against my chest—the specific cold of a body that was there and isn't. A theme I should probably address with a professional.
Odette is sitting up against the headboard, phone in both hands, blue light carving her face into planes of bone and shadow. Her jaw is set, her thumb still on the glass, and whatever she's reading has pulled her somewhere I can't follow.
Callum's reply. I don't need to see the words—the shape of them is written across her shoulders, in the shallow deliberate breathing, the thumb pressing into the phone's edge hard enough to whiten the nail bed.
She puts the phone face-down on the duvet and turns to look at me, and I watch it happen—the wall assembling behind her eyes in real time, brick by invisible brick. I have seen this construction project before, in the hallway of my flat when she found Celine in my robe.
"Are you okay?" Brilliant opening. The man who ran a department of forty is leading with the conversational equivalent of a wet handshake.
"I need to get back before the morning shift." Her voice is level, as if the pub’s staffing is the real issue here. The sheet slides off her shoulder and I have to study the ceiling because the alternative is memorising that freckle below her collarbone.
"I know," I say. My father's son, clearly—except my father would have had a plan by now, a moral framework that didn't involve lying in a bed that smells like a woman he's about to destroy.
Neither of us moves. The B&B radiator clicks and hisses—the only honest participant in this room, doing exactly what it was designed to do without apologising for the noise. Admirable, really—a machine that has never once questioned its purpose at three in the morning.
"Last night." My throat works around the words, each one heavier than the last. "It was the best and worst thing I've done in months."
Her head turns. Morning light catches the edge of her jaw, and my chest tightens in a way I'm choosing to interpret as a medical event. "Which half is winning?"
"The worst." I sit up, cool air finding the scratch marks on my shoulders that I absolutely deserve. "Because it can't happen again."
Her laugh is quiet, airless, aimed at the far wall. "I've heard that before. In my room, right before you kissed my forehead and left."
The accuracy is surgical. My hands find the edge of the mattress and grip, because the alternative is reaching for her, and reaching is the particular weakness I develop in her proximity that no amount of five AM penance has managed to correct.
"This time I mean it." The words taste like ash. Every morning run compressed into five syllables I don't believe even as they leave my mouth.
"Why?" One word. She's watching me the way she watched me the day I showed up in her pub—measuring, deciding what's worth keeping and what gets thrown into the harbour.
I take a breath. Then another, because the first one didn’t help. "Because I'm marrying Celine."
The sentence drops into the space between us and neither of us catches it. The radiator clicks. Somewhere outside, a gull screams, which feels like a brutal commentary on my actions that I didn't request.
"Say that again." Her voice has gone very still, and that’s worse. I’d prefer her screaming. I don’t get what I prefer recently.
"Celine is pregnant." Each word is a stone I'm laying into a wall of my own, my father's blueprint, the only architecture I have left. "The child deserves parents who are together. That's the code—the only thing I have left that still makes sense."
She stares at me, and… Makes a decision that I’m not privy to. Her lips part around a shape that could be a word or could be a blade, and my pulse hammers because whatever she's about to say will redraw the borders of everything.
Then she un-makes it. Her mouth closes. Her eyes hold mine for three more seconds, and then she swallows whatever was clawing its way out.
"I understand." I don't believe her. Understanding is not what just crossed her face. What crossed her face was something life-altering, but she decided to cover it back up.
She gets out of bed and dresses with her back to me. I should look away—a decent man would grant her this, the privacy of reassembling armour in a room that saw her without any.
Instead I watch the line of her spine as she pulls her shirt over her head, each vertebra disappearing under cotton. This is the last time I will see this. The geography of her body that I had four years to learn and a couple of months to mourn, vanishing under fabric one ridge at a time, and my mind traces the route greedily.
She pauses at the door, hand on the handle, shoulders held in a straight line that costs her everything. I can see the effort in the tension of her neck, the way her fingers whiten on the brass.
"You're the most principled idiot I've ever loved." She says it to the door, not to me, and the word loved—past tense, not present—drives into my chest like a particularly big and sharp knife. A machete, probably.
Past tense. She used past tense, and I am sitting in a bed that still holds her warmth and her word choice is going to ruin me more thoroughly than anything I've done to myself in the last months.
The door closes. Her footsteps on the stairs, then the front entrance, then nothing. The room holds the shape of her absence and the scent of her hair on the pillow, and I sit on the edge of the mattress like a man who has just performed surgery on himself without anaesthesia.
I pick up my phone. My thumb finds Matt's number automatically—Matt, who answers on the second ring because he's the kind of friend who sleeps with his phone charged, which is a form of loyalty I should stop exploiting.
"How'd Harrowcliff go?" Morning-rough, guarded—a guy who's been watching his best friend dismantle himself for months and has run out of gentle ways to say stop.
"I'm getting married." The words come out flat. I ignore the possibility of saying it with any emotion ever again.
The pause on his end stretches long enough to hear him sit up, hear the particular creak of a decision being weighed. "That's not what I asked."
My hand presses against the mattress where she was, and the sheets are still warm, and that warmth is the cruelest thing in this room. "I know."