[Odette’s POV]
The pub without Callum is a different building. Same brass taps, same scratched wood, same chalk specials board—except nobody rewrites it, and Tuesday's haddock has been the special for nine days.
Bev runs the bar the way an executioner runs a scaffold: efficient, humourless, each task dispatched with grim certainty. She communicates through sighs—short ones for minor infractions and a mid-range exhale reserved for me that translates to this is your fault.
I work my shifts, carry glasses, smile at regulars who don't notice the man behind the bar has changed or don't ask questions. Upstairs, the silence through the floorboards is its own weather—heavy, still, the kind of quiet that takes up more space than sound ever did.
No drums. No steady rhythm bleeding through the ceiling while I lie in bed pretending I'm not listening. Just wood and plaster and the shape of someone missing.
I call him on a Wednesday. My thumb hovers over his name for eleven minutes before I press it, because calling became terrifying immediately after the wedding that never happened.
Fourth ring. "Odette." His voice is warm and careful and approximately four hundred miles away.
"Hi." Brilliant opener. Shakespeare could never. A silence stretches, and I grip the phone tighter.
"How's Edinburgh?" I pull my knees up on the bed and press my back against the headboard.
"Cold. Full of opinions." A pause, the sound of a mug being set down. "The city, not me—I've gone quiet, which Jamie says is medically concerning."
"How is Jamie?" As if I even know who Jamie is—yes, he's Callum's cousin, but not more than that. My free hand picks at a thread on the duvet, because stillness requires a composure I do not have.
"Thinks I'm an idiot." A beat. "Which is fair."
My throat works around the next question, and I push it out before the silence swallows it. "Are you okay?"
"Working on it." Three words, each one measured, careful when it shouldn't be. "Are you?"
"Working on it too." I try for light and miss by a country mile. "Bev's sighs have developed subcategories. I think she's composing a symphony of disapproval."
He doesn't laugh. Callum always laughs—at everything, at nothing, at the space between sentences—and the absence of it is a door closing.
"I'm sorry," I say. Again. The word has lost its edges from overuse, smooth and useless as sea glass.
"Odette." His voice shifts—still kind, but stripped back underneath. "You need to stop apologising and start figuring out what you actually want. Sorry isn't a plan—it's just a sound you make so the silence doesn't eat you, and I can't keep being the person you make it to."
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. He's right, and the rightness of it sits on my chest like something with weight and patience and no intention of moving.
"I should go." Gentle, final, makes me think if he has practised this exit in a mirror. "Jamie's making something that smells criminal."
"Okay." The word is too small for the conversation, but the line goes dead before I find a bigger one.
I sit on the bed and the phone screen fades to black. My face stares back, distorted in the glass—dark circles, sharp jaw, someone I'm getting worse at recognising.
The notebook is on the nightstand where it always is. I open it to a blank page and write: What I Have Left. Three things—the baby, the pub job, the room—and the white space beneath them is so vast it makes my hand shake. I close the notebook before the list can breathe.
My mother calls at seven. Her name on the screen sends something through my ribs—not quite panic, not quite relief, not quite nostalgia, but all of that mashed together in a terrifying amalgamation.
I answer, because the list of people willing to call me is shrinking by the week and I can't afford to trim it further.
"Darling, the hydrangeas have gone absolutely berserk." She opens with the garden because the garden is safe—no feelings, no follow-up questions, just soil and stems and neutral territory.
"Dad's gardening again?" I tuck the phone against my shoulder and pull the blanket over my legs.
"Gardening is generous. He stands near the hose and things happen." She tells me about the neighbours' new fence, the cat sleeping in the recycling bin—small, ordinary things, each one a brick in a wall between us and whatever she actually wants to say.
I hear the shift before it comes. A breath drawn deeper than the last and—"Celine mentioned—she was hoping you might come to the wedding, darling." The sentence has the careful packaging of something rehearsed in a mirror.
"No." Flat, clean, out before she's finished. My mother doesn't push—she never pushes—and the silence between us stretches until it becomes uncomfortable.
"Odette." Softer now, the garden voice gone, something raw underneath. "Are you okay—really okay? You sound different lately, tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix."
She pauses, and when she speaks again her voice has the crack in it that mothers get when they already know the answer. "I can hear it, sweetheart."
My teeth press together. The truth is right there—the pregnancy, Liam, Callum, the ring in the harbour, the list with three items—all of it pressing against the backs of my teeth so hard my jaw aches with the holding.
But saying it on the phone feels wrong. Too small a container for something this enormous—she deserves eye contact for this, deserves to hold my hand while the words fall out.
"I'm fine, Mum. Just busy—I'll call soon." My voice holds, barely, the way a cracked glass holds water if nobody breathes on it.
"You always say that." Not accusatory—tired, the specific exhaustion of a mother who knows her daughter is lying and loves her too much to say so.
"I know. I'm sorry." There it is again—sorry, the word I hand out like flyers nobody wants.
"I love you, sweetheart." The gentleness is worse than any question she could ask, because questions I can deflect. Kindness goes straight through.
"Love you too." I hang up before my voice does something I haven't authorised.
The room is quiet. The floorboards are quiet. The whole building is quiet in a way it never was when a man with a drum kit lived below me and played after closing like the pub had a pulse.
I sit on the bed with my hand on my stomach. Under my palm, nothing yet—no curve, no flutter, just the flat, patient secret my body is keeping from everyone. The notebook sits closed on the nightstand, its shortest list inside.
Three things. A baby who doesn't exist yet, a job given to me by a man I drove away, and a room above a pub that used to have a heartbeat.
My phone lights up on the duvet—my mother again: Whatever it is, you can tell me. Whenever you're ready. My thumb traces the words, and my whole chest folds in on itself so completely I press my palm over my mouth to keep the sound inside.