[Callum’s POV]
The harbour wall is cold under my palms. She hasn't answered my last question. The silence has stopped being a pause and become a biography, and I already know the ending because I've been reading it since she came home in yesterday's clothes and I made small talk about haddock.
Here's where we are, because my brain won't stop narrating even when I beg it to. I'm sitting next to a woman I'm in love with who's pregnant with another man's baby—a man she loves, a man who's marrying someone else, a man she slept with post-breakup—I don't know the specifics, but I'm not an idiot.
My text sat unread on her nightstand while she was in his bed. Three words I agonised over for forty minutes—I'll be here—completely wasted on a screen she didn't check.
I should be furious, and some corner of me is—the corner that wants to pitch something into the harbour the way she pitched that ring. But the rest is quieter, worse—I walked into this with my eyes open and my hands out, and now I'm holding exactly what I reached for.
"Do you hate me?" Her voice is small, aimed at the water, and my ribs contract hard enough to notice.
"No." It comes out immediately, and I mean it, which is the most irritating part of this whole situation. I've searched my entire chest for outrage and come up empty.
"What are you thinking?" She turns toward me, and in the harbour light her face is all sharp angles and wet lashes and I look at the boats instead.
"I'm thinking I spent thirty-two years avoiding this exact scenario." My mouth moves before my brain can edit. "Thirty-two years keeping it light, keeping it fun, never sitting on a wall in the dark with my insides turned out."
I pick up the bottle and turn it because my hands need a task. "I had rules, Odette. Actual rules, written on a napkin in a Glasgow pub when I was nineteen—not legally binding, but I took them seriously."
"And then a woman walked into my pub, threw her ring into the water, and I forgot every single one." The laugh that scrapes out of me is thin and wrong, nothing like my usual. "Just gone, like nineteen-year-old Callum wrote them in disappearing ink."
The first tear rolls down her cheek, catching light, and my whole body leans toward her—every muscle pulling in to close the gap, say forget it, forget Liam, forget London, we'll figure it out. The words sit on my tongue, warm and ready.
But the drum kit in the back room taught me something, didn't it. Fifteen years I've kept that kit—six addresses, two countries, a van breakdown in Calais—and the reason it stayed is because it never walked out of my pub wearing someone else's history.
I only hold onto things that stay. And she was never mine—not the parts that mattered, not the part that whispers a name half asleep, not the part that booked a B&B two miles down the coast.
I swallow the words. My jaw aches with the effort of keeping my mouth shut for once in my entire life.
"The room upstairs is yours. Long as you need it." My voice comes out flat, practical—I'm discussing lease terms while my organs quietly reorganise. "The job too."
"I can't stay here and work for you after everything." She wipes her face with her sleeve, and the smallness of the gesture makes me stare hard at a trawler rocking against its mooring.
"You can and you will." I keep my eyes on the water. "Because I'm not the kind of man who punishes people for being honest, even when the honesty shows up months late."
A rope creaks somewhere in the dark. The harbour breathes between us, patient and indifferent.
"I'm going to Edinburgh for a while." The sentence becomes real as it leaves my mouth, which is irritating because I hadn't fully committed until this second. "My cousin Jamie's. Few weeks, maybe longer—Bev's been planning a hostile takeover since 2019."
"Are you coming back?" Her voice cracks on back, and my teeth press together until my molars ache.
I open my mouth, and the answer should be automatic—yes, obviously, my name's on the license, my drums are in the back room. But the word snags somewhere between my lungs and my teeth.
"I don't know." My voice splits on know—and the sound shocks me because I haven't heard it from my own throat since I was seventeen and my mum's kitchen and a space where a drum kit used to be.
She presses her hand over her mouth. I stand, because one more second on this wall and the words I swallowed will climb back up and ruin everything.
Upstairs, packing takes twenty minutes. Jeans, shirts, the good jacket. I move through it fast, because stopping means thinking and thinking means sitting back down on that wall and saying things I can't take back.
The back room is dark when I push the door open. The kit sits where it's always sat—bass, snare, two toms, hi-hat, crash—patient and unchanged and mine.
I lower myself onto the stool and put my hands on my knees. The sticks are right there on the snare, and I don't pick them up—just sit with fifteen years of the only commitment I ever managed, the room so quiet my breathing bounces off the cymbals.
I touch the crash—barely a tap, a whisper of brass that hangs in the dark for three seconds before fading. Then I walk out and close the door behind me.
The bag pulls at my shoulder when I come through the pub. She's at the bar, sitting on the stool closest to the taps—the one she always picks—her hands wrapped around a mug of something she's not drinking.
My feet stop. I didn't authorise the stop, my legs just quit on me, the mutinous bastards, and I'm standing in the middle of my own pub with a bag on my shoulder and no script for this part.
"The man who can't commit to anything committed to you." The words bypass every filter I've built in thirty-two years of smooth talk and easy exits. "You should know that meant something, even if it wasn't enough."
"Callum." My name in her mouth, soft and full, held with both hands, and the sound of it sends my every nerve toward her—
"Don't." Fast. Almost desperate. "If you say the right thing I won't leave, and we both know I have to."
Her mouth closes. Her eyes are bright and full and aimed at me, and I am walking—bag on shoulder, hand on the door—because my body knows how to leave even when the rest of me is screaming different instructions.
The door closes behind me. Night air, sharp with salt. My chest shudders once on the exhale—one sound, and I am never making it again.
Inside, the drums are silent and the pub is dark, and the woman at the bar is alone with both. And I am already gone.