The stairs creak on the fourth and ninth step, and I have learned this because it’s still doesn’t feel like home, which means I’m cautious of everything. Callum is behind the bar, like he always is, and the coffee is poured before I reach the bottom.
"Morning." He slides the mug across without looking up from the glass he's drying. No pause, no loaded anything, and my shoulders come down from somewhere near my earlobes.
"Morning." I take the stool, and the coffee is strong enough to trigger another nausea. Thank god it doesn’t. The toast appears beside it within thirty seconds, buttered, cut diagonally, and at this point, I think he’s mocking me.
"You don't have to feed me every time I come downstairs." My hands close around the mug because they need something to hold. "I'm capable of sourcing my own breakfast."
"I feed everyone who sits at my bar, you're not special." He smiles so readily that it feels like a lie. Especially the not special part—of course I’m special. "Although you are the only one sleeping upstairs, which gives you an unfair advantage in the breakfast queue."
The beach does not exist between us. Not in his face, not in his voice, not in the half-inch of air between his hand and the mug when he sets it down.
"I need a waitress," he says, mid-bite of his own toast, as casually as a man mentioning the weather. "Last one followed her boyfriend to Bristol, and apparently, love conquers employment law."
"I'll do it." The words leave before I’ve consciously decided, and his eyebrows lift a fraction. "When do I start?"
"You just did." He throws me a cloth and nods toward the tables. My new career begins with a damp rag and a man who conducts interviews in under nine seconds.
The lunch rush is a creature with its own pulse. I learn the regulars by their orders before their names—the fisherman who drinks Guinness at noon, the woman with the red scarf who sends back every third plate on principle, the teenagers who nurse one Coke between four.
My hands remember how to carry three plates, and my smile remembers how to sell itself. Something old and capable wakes up in my limbs, the muscle memory of being good at a thing when being good at life has recently gone sideways.
Callum watches, and I catch him doing it twice, once when I upsell a dessert, once when I make the fisherman laugh so hard his Guinness trembles. He polishes a glass and the corner of his mouth moves, and that is the entire performance review.
The lull arrives around three. He leans against the back counter, arms crossed, the henley performing its usual crimes on his forearms.
"Right, you've survived lunch without crying or quitting, which puts you ahead of the last three." He uncrosses his arms and reaches for two mugs. "Tea?"
"Please." I take the stool again, and my feet ache after all the running. Especially while feeling so easily exhausted—thanks to pregnancy. "So the pub—you said you bought it on a bet."
"Poker game, back room of a club in Camden." He sets the tea down and settles opposite me, elbows on the bar. "I had savings I didn't know about, which is the financial equivalent of finding a tenner in a coat you forgot you owned."
"You accidentally saved money." I blow across the surface of the tea because looking at his hands while he talks is becoming a navigational hazard. Is that also the pregnancy thing? "That might be the most accidentally responsible thing I've ever heard."
"The universe was as surprised as anyone." His grin is wide and warm and too easy to look at. "The band had just died its noble death, the bike was sold, and I walked past this place with a seagull on the chimney and thought, well, he seems committed."
I laugh, and the sound is still new enough in my throat that I notice it arrive. "And the band—do you miss it?"
"Touring, sometimes, the bike, often, the band itself, not remotely." He pauses, and the pause has a shape I haven't heard from him before. "I've got this theory—everyone has one thing they're secretly loyal to, and everything else is just performance."
My cloth stops on the counter, because the sudden quiet in his voice has caught me off guard. "And what's yours?"
"Drum kit, back room, behind the beer crates." He says it simply, the way a person names the truest thing about themselves without noticing they've done it. "Had it since I was seventeen—everything else I've walked away from, but the kit comes with me every single time."
My mouth opens to say I know, I hear you every night through the floor, and the rhythm is the thing that puts me to sleep. The words dissolve before they reach air, because saying them means admitting I wait for the sound of him, and that is a door I cannot open.
"Seventeen years is a long time to keep anything," I say instead. It is the coward's version of what I mean, and his eyes stay on mine a beat too long, as if he knows there was more.
"Longer than most marriages, statistically." He raises his mug with mock solemnity. "To commitment in all its impractical forms."
I tap my mug against his and do not think about the word marriage and the taste it leaves in my mouth now. My phone buzzes in my apron, and the screen shows Mum: Are you okay, when are you coming home, my darling?
I type with one thumb under the bar, I'm fine, busy with something, back when I'm back, love you, don't worry, every word a small white bandage over a wound I cannot show her. The phone goes face-down, and the cloth goes back in my hand, and neither action fixes anything.
Callum watches me the way he's been watching all day, quiet and careful and not asking. He is a man who has seen a phone screen change a woman's face and chosen not to remark on it.
"Break's over," I say as a new customer enters the bar, and he nods, and I go back to the tables. The afternoon fills itself with plates and glasses and the kind of work that lets a person disappear for hours at a time.
Later, the room is dark except for harbour lights painting shapes on the ceiling. I am in bed with tea gone cold on the nightstand when it starts below me, through the floorboards—the drums.
Steady, rhythmic, alive, a heartbeat the building borrows after closing. The pattern shifts, speeds, settles, and he plays the way he talks—loose and warm with sudden moments of precision that catch me somewhere I wasn't guarding.
My hand moves to my stomach without permission. Under my palm there is nothing yet, no curve, no movement, just the flat quiet of a body keeping a secret even from itself.
This room with its creaking stairs and thin walls and a man drumming below me who does not know what I am carrying. This is the first place since London that has not asked me to be anyone.
The thought arrives and takes the air out of me so completely. I press my face into the pillow. I am going to be a mother, and I have absolutely no idea how to do it without turning into mine.