And as everyone filters out, the Vicar stepping outside to shake hands and give Christmas wishes, I stay.
That’s how we end up alone together.
I feel him before I see him.
A shift in the air, a current I know all too well, the prickle of awareness that used to make me dizzy with longing but now makes my stomach knot with something too tangled to name. I hear his careful bootsteps, slow and certain, the kind that never rush, never falter. My breath stutters in my heaving chest, and even as our baby attacks me from the inside, as though he too, senses his father’s presence, I force myself not to look up.
But when he passes my row, strolling past me at a glacial pace, not turning in my direction at all, the world narrows to a pinprick.
Billy moves like a shadow in human form, tall, poised, carved from grief and fury and devotion. My heart hammers so hard it feels as though it’s going to punch free of my chest and launch itself up onto the altar in offering.
I grip the edge of the pew as he walks right past me.
Billy Blackwell.
My soulmate.
My Pair.
My monster.
The man I fled.
The man I love with a desperation that tastes like blood in my mouth and blades in my chest.
Panic floods through me so fast I almost retch. I thought I never wanted him to find me. I thought I wanted silence, freedom, anonymity. I’ve spent nights whispering to myself, convincing myself that running was the only way, that distance was my salvation.
But now that he’s here, breathing the same air, close enough I could reach out and brush my fingers against his coat, I realisejust how hard I’ve been lying to myself with every fractured breath.
I wanted him to find me.
I’ve always wanted him to find me.
My love for him is a sickness, a fever, a bruise I keep pressing just to feel something real. I need him like a wound needs pressure, painfully, desperately, helplessly.
Just to survive.
I am lovesick.
And yet terror wraps around my ribs like barbed wire.
What is he going to do? How is he going to look at me? What will I tell him when he asks why I ran?
How can I tell him the truth, that I fled because of his father, because of the threat, because I was carrying his child and feared losing everything, without lighting the fuse to his rage? How can I speak the words without sending him spiralling into war?
Billy reaches the altar, placing his hands on its edge as though steadying himself. His shoulders rise and fall, slow, controlled, but I know the storm gathering beneath the surface.
I know him.
I love him.
Darkly, entirely, in a way that makes me feel both alive and dead.
Panic drums through my skull like a battering ram. My legs unbend, knees falling away from beneath my chin, feet touching the floor like a barely there caress.
Ready to run.
To flee.
