[Liam’s POV]
Celine has spread the invitation proofs across the kitchen table—cream card stock, gold lettering, the kind of paper that costs more per sheet than most people spend on lunch. Small ceremony, family only.
I pick one up. Liam Ashford & Celine Marsden request the pleasure of your company. Our names in copperplate script, neat and inevitable, and the thing that should be happening inside my chest—that happened before—pride, nerves, the warm ache of a man about to marry—doesn't arrive.
I wait for it the way you'd wait for a train that's been cancelled without announcement. The platform stays empty—not dread, not doubt, just nothing, and the absence is worse than any ache because it confirms I am no longer participating in my own life.
From the next room, Celine's voice carries through the doorway—bright, warm, a woman who is genuinely enjoying this. "Peonies and ranunculus, yes, but loose, Diane, I don't want anything that looks arranged—" She laughs at something the florist says.
The sound is easy and real. I set the proof back on the table and align it with the others because symmetry is a problem I can solve. Trainers on. Laces double-knotted. The front door closes behind me.
London in the morning is the only version of this city I can tolerate—dark, deserted, stripped of its opinions. Same route, same distance, same discipline dressed as something nobler than it is.
My lungs find their rhythm by the second mile, and my brain does what it always does when the body is too occupied to supervise—opens the drawer I've been keeping shut. Odette's face. The morning I told her.
We were on the edge of a B&B bed that still smelled like the worst and best mistake of my life, and I delivered the news the way I'd deliver quarterly results to a board I was betraying. Something crossed her expression—fast, terrifying or terrified, or both.
Her mouth opened. Closed. Whatever she was about to say retreated behind her teeth, and I let it go because chasing would have meant staying, and staying would have meant becoming someone unrecognisable.
I've replayed that moment at every mile marker since. The confession she swallowed—I don't know what it was, but my body knows, somewhere below logic, in a place no amount of morning asphalt has managed to quiet.
The flat is warm when I get back. Celine has breakfast laid out—eggs, toast, orange juice in the tall glasses she bought last week—and she's sitting at the table with one hand on her stomach, protective and deliberate.
"How are you feeling?" I pull out the chair opposite, and my voice does its job, shows the competence of spending its' career asking the right questions without caring about the answers.
"Tired." She smiles, sips her juice. "But fine. We're fine." We—the plural that includes a person who doesn't exist yet and somehow outranks everyone who does. I pick up my fork and move the eggs around because eating requires an appetite and mine packed its bags somewhere around Harrowcliff.
"When's the next scan?" I keep my voice casual—a boardroom skill, asking loaded questions with the intonation reserved for weather questions.
"Doctor moved it to after the wedding. Scheduling, apparently." She shrugs—light, unconcerned. "Everyone wants appointments in May."
"Right." I nod. Something about the timing scratches at me—the scan pushed past the ceremony, the pregnancy mentioned often but examined rarely—but pursuing it leads somewhere I'm not equipped to go over scrambled eggs.
"Odette isn't coming." Celine says it gently, setting her glass down. "I tried, Liam. I really did."
"What did she say?" My fork pauses on the plate. The question is a reflex—the part of me that still monitors every scrap of information about a woman I'm not supposed to be monitoring.
"She didn't say much. You know how she gets." Celine's mouth curves into something tender and sad. "I'm just—I'm sad about it. I wish she could be happy for us."
Every word is calibrated—the right disappointment, the right resigned acceptance, the sister who tried her best against stubbornness. It is a flawless construction, and questioning it would require cruelty I can't justify.
"Maybe it's better this way," I say, and the words taste like cardboard. My fork resumes its circuit of the plate, moving eggs from one side to the other.
"Maybe." Her agreement arrives a half-beat too quick—barely perceptible, the conversational equivalent of a car accelerating through a yellow light. But I don't register it because I'm somewhere else entirely.
A different kitchen. A different coastline. A woman reading me a hate list through a phone at eleven at night while I laughed so hard I forgot I was drowning.
Harrowcliff. The B&B room. Her spine in morning light. The word loved in past tense, and the door closing behind her while I sat with my principles stacked around me like sandbags against a flood they were never built to hold.
"Do you think we're doing the right thing?" The question leaves my mouth before the part of me that manages public statements can intervene. Celine's hand crosses the table and covers mine—warm, steady, certain.
"I know it's complicated." Her thumb strokes my knuckle. "But we have a baby coming, Liam, and that's bigger than complicated. That's bigger than anything."
Bigger than complicated. Bigger than anything. A simple equation: child plus duty equals commitment. I have built my entire identity on this arithmetic, and it holds—the way a bridge holds when you stop reading the engineering reports.
My father would approve. He approved of everything that required sacrifice and nothing that required honesty—a distinction I should have examined before inheriting his entire operational manual.
"Yes," I say. The syllable sits between us with all the conviction of a parking ticket. She smiles—real, warm—and I smile back because smiling is the contract, and I have never defaulted on a contract, even the ones I signed without reading the terms.
"We're going to be fine, Liam." She squeezes my hand once and stands, pressing a kiss to the top of my head. "I know you don't feel it yet. But we will be."
The certainty in her voice is a finished building—no scaffolding, no doubt. She carries her plate to the sink, and the tap runs. She hums something light and bright that fills the kitchen with the shape of a life I'm supposed to want.
The door swings shut behind her. I sit alone with cold toast and a table covered in invitations bearing a name that reads like someone else's autobiography.
My phone is in my hand before I've made the decision. Odette's name on the screen—still saved with the blue star I assigned two years ago when the future seemed survivable.
It rings once. Twice. Three times, each one a separate unit of time in which I could hang up and remain the man who chose correctly. Four. Five. Voicemail—her voice, steady and warm, a recording I've heard enough times that the cadence lives in my muscle memory.
The beep sounds. My mouth opens, and nothing comes—not because I have nothing to say but because everything I'd say belongs to a version of us that I dismantled with my own hands.
I end the call. Set the phone face-down on the invitation proof, screen against cream card stock, her name pressed to mine in a way the copperplate never managed.