[Odette’s POV]
The harbour road is longer at five in the morning than it was yesterday, it feels like. My shoes slap against wet stone, and the sound reminds me of every bad decision I've made in the past twelve hours.
Salt air, grey light, a gull perched on a bollard watching me with zero thoughts behind the eyes. I envy the gull, who did not sleep with its ex-fiancé in a B&B that provides complimentary biscuits on the pillow like a reward for moral failure.
My phone sits heavy in my jacket pocket, Callum's message coiled inside it. I have been carrying both for the length of this walk without opening either, because apparently I have developed a talent for avoidance that could go professional.
I stop where the path curves toward the pub and pull out the phone. Three words on the screen: Okay. I'll be here.
My thumb hovers over the letters, tracing each one without touching. My chest constricts painfully, and I refuse to think about it on zero sleep.
The pub door is unlocked. Inside, brass taps and scratched wood and the chalk specials board Callum rewrites every morning in handwriting so neat it feels robotic.
He's behind the bar, moving through the opening routine the way he always does—glasses from the rack, coffee machine hissing to life, a cloth over his shoulder. He looks up when the door closes behind me.
His eyes move over my face, my clothes, recognizing the look of walking two miles in last night’s outfit at dawn. Whatever he reads in that sweep, he keeps to himself.
"You look like you haven't slept." He sets a mug under the machine, the coffee already pouring before he's finished the sentence.
"I haven't." My voice is gravel, which is fitting, since the rest of me feels like something scraped off a road.
"Right." He slides the coffee across the bar. No follow-up, no raised eyebrow, just the mug and the word right doing the work of an entire conversation he's choosing not to have.
I sit on the stool closest to the taps and wrap both hands around the ceramic, heat seeping into fingers I didn't realise were cold. I wait for it—did you sleep with him, was it worth it, are you choosing him—but nothing comes.
"Bev called about covering Tuesday." He turns back to the glasses, voice steady and ordinary. "Said she can do lunch but not dinner."
I stare at the side of his face. He is talking about shift coverage, and the ordinariness is so deliberate it could cut glass.
"Fish delivery came early, and the cod looks dodgy." He holds a pint glass up to the light, inspects it, sets it on the shelf. "Might need to swap the special to haddock."
"Callum." My voice comes out smaller than I intend, and he pauses with the next glass halfway to the shelf.
"Haddock's better anyway." He resumes polishing, and the micro-pause before the sentence is precise. "People only think they prefer cod because they've never given haddock a fair chance."
He is talking about fish. The normalcy presses against my ribs until I have to look down at my coffee because my eyes are doing something I did not approve.
Each sentence comes wrapped in a micro-pause where his throat works and his hand stills. Then he swallows the real thing and delivers the safe thing instead, and I can see the cost in the tendons of his forearms, in shoulders held a quarter inch too high.
"Liam is marrying Celine." The words leave my mouth before I've decided to say them, landing on the bar between us like something shattered.
Callum's hand stops on the glass he's drying—full stop, mid-rotation, knuckles white around the rim. The radio presenter moves on to traffic updates, and neither of us is listening.
"Say that again." Very even, very quiet—trying to decide whether his composure is worth it right now.
"My sister. He told me this morning." Each word tastes like something I'm coughing up, and every one is accurate, which is the worst thing about truth—it doesn't soften just because you need it to.
He sets the glass down with a gentleness that makes a statement about what the alternative would have been. I can see the arithmetic behind his face—every question he's been swallowing rearranging itself around this new information.
"How do you feel about that?" He asks it quietly, eyes still on the glass, and I almost laugh because the question is so reasonable and my answer is so catastrophically not.
"I don't know yet." The lie comes out smooth, automatic, the verbal equivalent of muscle memory.
His head lifts. Whatever my face is doing—whatever my body is broadcasting that I haven't been able to control since a B&B room that smelled like another man's soap—his jaw shifts. "That's a lie, and we both know it."
My hands tighten on the mug. The ceramic is almost too hot now, but I hold on because the burn gives me something to focus on besides the cavity behind my ribs. "Yes. It's a lie. I feel like someone scooped out my chest with a spoon—is that honest enough?"
"Yeah." His voice is rough now, the professional calm finally cracking at the edges. "Yeah, that's honest enough."
He puts down the cloth, comes around the bar, past the taps and the ice well, and sits on the stool beside mine. His shoulder presses against my shoulder—solid, warm, deliberate.
He doesn't say it's going to be okay. He doesn't say you're better off. He doesn't offer a single comfortable lie, and the absence of comfort closes my throat tighter than any words could.
We sit like that while the coffee machine gurgles and the harbour wakes up outside in its usual chorus of boat engines and rigging. Morning light cuts through the pub windows in long amber slats, turning the bottles behind the bar into stained glass.
I put my head on his shoulder. His arm comes around me—slow, careful—settling across my back with a weight that says I'm here and asks absolutely nothing in return.
My forehead presses against the warm cotton of his shirt. I breathe in soap and coffee grounds and the faintest trace of wood polish.
This is the man who stays even when I give him every reason to leave. The thought arrives whole and unedited, and it is the only thing in my chest that doesn't hurt.
His chin rests on the top of my head, his hand moving once across my shoulder blade before it stills. For thirty seconds I let myself have this without ruining it.