The harbour wall is cold through my jeans. The ginger ale is warm in my hand, and for twenty minutes this has been enough—sitting beside Callum after closing, legs dangling over black water, the harbour lights throwing copper coins across the surface.
He's quiet tonight. Not his regular quiet, which is a man choosing silence because the view is better from there—this is the other kind, where silence is a fuse and I can hear it burning.
"You alright?" I nudge his knee with mine, and the contact should be easy but his leg doesn't nudge back.
"I need to ask you something." He turns the bottle between his palms, watching the label peel. "And I need you to tell the truth—not the edited version, not the one that makes you the victim and me the good sport."
My stomach drops through the stone beneath me. "Okay," I say, and the word tastes like a door I can't close again.
"I've been patient." He says it to the water, not to me. "More patient than I thought I was capable of, which is a low bar because I once quit a gym membership after three days."
The joke dies on impact because his voice doesn't carry it. I press my thumb into the condensation on the bottle and trace a line down because my hands need a task or they'll shake.
"I watched you text him like he was a dentist appointment you needed to reschedule. I held you the morning you came back in last night's clothes and said nothing—not because I'm noble, but because I didn't trust what would come out."
The ginger ale sweats against my palm. A rope groans somewhere to our left, a boat pulling against a mooring it can't release.
"But I'm done. Patience without honesty is just cowardice pretending to be better." He looks at me now, and the harbour light catches the flat, steady thing his eyes have become—no warmth, no deflection. "Do you love him?"
The word him doesn't need a name. There is only one him in this sentence, and we both know it.
I look at the water. The black surface holds the lights like open wounds, bright, not healing, and I let the seconds pass because I can't make my mouth form either answer. The silence stretches long enough to stop being a pause and become a confession.
Callum nods—slow, heavy, his chin dipping and staying down. "Right." The word is quiet enough that the waves almost take it.
I open my mouth and close it. There are twelve versions of this sentence and none of them will make his shoulders come down from where they've climbed toward his ears.
"Second question." He sets the bottle on the wall between us, and the glass-on-stone sound is too loud for the size of it. "This one you don't get to dodge."
My ribs contract. He turns toward the water, but his voice is aimed directly at me, careful and rehearsed, and I realise he's been building toward this all evening.
"I've noticed things, for weeks now. The mornings you think I can't hear through the floor." His voice has gone careful, each word placed deliberately. "The way you haven't touched a drink since you got here—don't say you just don't like alcohol, because you ordered wine your first night and never again."
He looks at me sideways, and the steadiness of his gaze is worse than accusation. "The jumpers two sizes too big. Your hand right here—" he touches his own stomach, briefly, "—when you think nobody's watching."
The harbour lights blur, sharpen, blur again. "Are you pregnant?" Three words, no cushion, and every molecule of air between us turns to glass.
My hands go cold around the bottle—the ginger ale could be liquid nitrogen for all my fingers register.
I could lie. The word no is right there, two letters, one syllable, and it would buy me another month of borrowed time. But Callum texted I'll be here while I was in another man's bed, and lying to his face right now would make me worse than anyone who's ever hurt me.
"Yes." The word leaves my mouth and takes a wall with it—whatever was holding the architecture of this particular lie upright.
His breath pushes out through his nose, long and controlled. A man who expected the answer and is winded by it anyway. "Is it Liam's?"
"Yes." I say it to the water because saying it to his face would require a courage I've spent entirely.
The waves fill the space where language used to be. A light flickers on a mast across the harbour, and I watch it because it's easier than anything else in my line of sight.
"How long have you known?" Very level, very controlled—impressive, really, except I can hear the structure creaking.
"Since before I started working at the pub." The sentence comes out whole, without hesitation, and that fact is the most cruel of all.
His jaw shifts—I see the muscle moving under his skin, the slow clench and release of a man recalculating months of his life. "So every day—" He turns toward me, and I make myself look at him because I owe him that.
"Every shift, every conversation, every night you were in my bed—you were carrying this and said nothing." Each phrase is delivered separately, three nails driven in sequence.
"I didn't know how." My voice cracks on how, and I hate it—hate that my throat has chosen now to betray me when my mouth finally did the right thing.
"You could have opened your mouth." The edge surprises us both—his shoulders pull back, and I watch him register his own sharpness like a man hearing a stranger use his voice. "Which is generally how words work."
He looks away. Breathes out hard, his profile backlit by the harbour lamps, and his hand spreads flat on the stone between us, each finger pressing down like he's testing whether the wall can hold him.
His throat moves. His eyes close, then open. Beneath the tightness in his shoulders and the sharp edge still hanging between us, something else crosses his face—his brow loosens, his mouth unclenches, and the breath he releases is deeper than the ones before it.
Not controlled. Surrendered.
A gull screams somewhere over the rooftops. The water is black and the lights are gold and my hands are still freezing and his are still on the stone, and between us the ginger ale sits untouched in the space where the easy part of the day used to live.
His mouth opens, closes, opens again. "Were you ever going to tell me?" The question hangs over the black water, and I don't have an answer that won't make both of us worse.