[Odette’s POV]
I take the third stool from the end because it is closest to the door. Callum is behind the bar in a henley the colour of a bruise, sleeves shoved to the elbow. His forearms are his first crime. The second is he is the most awake human I have shared a room with, eight mornings running.
"You look like a woman in need of caffeine or a priest, and I'm only licensed for one," he says, sliding a mug across the bar without being asked.
My hands close round the mug as I look Callum over. He is thirty-something and takes up a doorway without trying, black hair grown out or given up, a scar at his mouth that came off a horse in Andalusia on Tuesday and a fight in Prague on Thursday—I got lost in all his stories.
He’s also, coincidentally, the owner of the bar, the bartender and my landlord. Quite a multifaceted person he is.
"You've gone green round the edges, love. Toast?" He grins, and his grin ought to carry a warning sticker, the grin of a man who has either broken hearts or broken laws. Probably both.
"Charming." The mug is the only thing keeping me vertical. His hands are the problem. Rough, the knuckles faintly ink-dark, a thin silver ring on the smallest finger. In fourteen days I haven't looked at a man's hands. I am looking now, and my mouth has gone inconveniently dry.
The coffee that was, thirty seconds ago, keeping me vertical renegotiates its terms. It rises hot and sudden, and the metal taste that has been my house guest three mornings floods in behind it.
"Back in a minute." I am off the stool before he can ask, and I register his hand lifting from the bar as if he would catch me.
The stairs are older than the pub and I take them two at a time, because being sick in Callum Ware's stairwell is not a Tuesday I am prepared to have. I brace my palms on the toilet bowl and stare down the drain.
Three mornings. Three mornings in a row, the fourth today, and I have run out of things to blame. Stress, sea air, the cheap oil at the chippy. Grief, which is famously a stomach sport.
The cabinet contains paracetamol, antacids, and a small pink box I bought Tuesday behind a magazine I did not want, from a pharmacist who did not look up.
I have been ignoring the box three days. The box has been exceptionally patient. I take it down, and my hands have developed a tremor they did not have downstairs.
The instructions are simple, in the way humiliating instructions always are. I follow them, set the stick on the rim of the bath, and refuse, as a point of personal dignity, to look while the timer runs.
The grout lines on the opposite wall are fourteen across, nineteen down, and I’ve never been this focused on math.
The timer chimes, polite, like a toaster telling me breakfast is done, and I look because down.
Two lines. Pink, unembarrassed, the colour of a child's felt-tip. Two lines on a plastic stick in a rented bathroom above a rented stool in a town I chose because I had never heard of it.
I am carrying the child of the man whose face ran under a headline I demanded to be written, who does not know where I am, and who I am not entirely sure I know anymore.
The list of Those Who Should Know begins before I choose to make one. Liam, whose out of the questions entirely for obvious reasons.
My mother, who would come, and where she comes my sister follows—Celine. And I cannot tell Celine, because if I do, she’ll get all teary and start feeling sorry for me, and we can’t have that.
The name arrives with a cold I cannot account for. Callum, who would need the dress and the altar and the headline stories, and I have known Callum for only eight days. On the bright side—he’s the only one keeping me company right now. Bet he would recount it later as one of his crazy stories.
I wrap the stick in loo paper until it is a small white mummy, bury it under yesterday's tissues, wash my face twice, and do not look at the mirror a third time. Then I go back down, because if there’s anything I need right now, it’s not to be alone.
Callum looks up when the door swings. He does not remark on how long I was gone, which is either kindness or practice. "Feeling human?" He pushes a glass of water toward me before I can sit, ice, a slice of something green on the rim.
"Debatable. Orange juice, actually. And I don't drink. Thought I'd mention it." My legs would like it on record they are complying under written protest.
"Noted." He doesn't ask why. He pours the juice and sets it down like a truce, and it is the first lie of my new life, and I am already counting. "Story for your trouble. Free with the second glass, mandatory with the third, and I'm prepared to lower the bar for medical cases."
I laugh. It escapes without my permission, and he catches it like a man who knows laughter is currency and is quietly keeping count.
His eyes drop to my left hand on the bar and stay a half-second longer than a man making no comment gets to stay. My palm goes hot, and my ring shines treacherously under the sun.
"That's a serious rock." His tone is almost neutral. The almost is the whole problem, and both of us are pretending not to notice.
"It's a ring." I say it the way a woman says it when she has forgotten, for entire hours, that it was ever on her finger.
"It's a serious ring, then." He doesn't smile. He doesn't not smile. He waits as if at a door he has already decided not to open.
I look down. I have not looked at my own left hand with any honesty in fourteen days. The stone is a prop from a play that closed mid-run. "Back in a minute." I repeat and slide off the stool, and my pulse is behind my ears, and I cannot tell if it is him or the stick in the bin or the ring.
"You keep saying that." He says it low, to my back, and it is the closest he has come to asking a second question.
Outside, the tide is in and the water is the colour of old pewter. I work the ring over my knuckle. It does not want to come, and then it does, and the weight in my palm is obscene.
I open my hand. The ring makes a small tidy arc, and the splash is gone before the ripple reaches the nearest hull.
Behind me, the pub door is open. Callum is in it, two jackets over his arm, which he has acquired in the time it took me to throw two years into the sea.
He crosses the cobbles and settles a jacket round my shoulders. It smells of cedar and cold smoke, and his knuckles brush my collarbone on the way down and do not hurry.
The beach is empty. The sun is doing the cheap trick where it bleeds into the water and calls itself a sunset. Neither of us speaks, and the silence is the first in fourteen days that has not asked me anything.
He stops. He turns. The last of the light catches him along the jaw, and my mouth, helpfully, goes dry a second time in under an hour.
"Odette." He has not used my name before tonight, and it changes the shape of the air between us. "What are you running from?"
Behind my teeth, the answer assembles in pieces. A stick in a bin. A dress in a hotel skip. A headline in London. A sister whose face I cannot, suddenly, think about without the taste of metal.
Nothing comes out. Not a word, not a breath, only the gulls and the tide carrying on without me, and a man I have known eight days waiting for an answer I no longer have the mouth for.