“Hoping doesn’t make you stupid.”
“Don’t,” she snaps, the word sharp with panic.“Don’t be kind.”
Callum lets the silence stretch.Kindness is its own kind of danger.
Isla’s chin lifts again, defensive.“It was just music,” she says, as if repeating it will make it hurt less.“That’s all he ever left behind.”
Callum’s gaze slides to the piano.“Music is never just music.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she fires back.“You got him.”
Callum flinches at the accuracy.
“I got parts of him,” he says slowly.“And it wasn’t always the good parts.”
There were nights, he remembered, taking care of a drunk Keir.A man haunted by ghosts of the past.And now Callum was beginning to understand why.
Isla stills, startled by the admission.
“He could be generous,” Callum continues, voice low.“And he could be selfish.Brilliant and cruel in the same hour.He could make you feel chosen and then punish you for believing it.”
Isla’s throat works.“So why didn’t he choose me?”
The question isn’t sharp.
It’s worse.
It’s honest.
Callum has no answer.
He thinks of Keir dragging him out of a future that would have destroyed him.And he thinks of Isla as a child, waiting.
The contradiction doesn’t resolve.It only sharpens.
“I don’t know,” Callum admits.“It makes no sense to me.”
The words feel like betrayal and relief.
“But I’m starting to wonder,” he adds, “if the man I knew and the man who left you were the same person at all.”
Isla stares at him like she can’t decide whether she wants to tear the thought apart or cling to it.
“That doesn’t make it better,” she says.
“No,” he agrees.“It makes it complicated.”
“Everything about him is,” she whispers.
Callum nods.“Keir never did simple.”
Isla turns away, palm flattening on the piano as if she needs something solid.“My mother says he didn’t want to see me.”
Callum’s jaw tightens.“Did she say why?”
“She said he chose the music,” Isla replies.“That he chose drugs and women and fame.That I was collateral damage.”
Callum’s mind flashes to Keir sober at three in the morning, staring at nothing like it was a verdict.To the rare nights he wouldn’t touch whiskey at all, fingers white around the glass as if refusing himself something.
