Pete keeps talking. “I met James years later, when I’d finally started to feel like an adult. He gave me everything I wanted. Stability, security. A face to come home to every night. Someone to wake up next to me in the morning. There were some days where he’d spoil me rotten and I felt like the luckiest man on earth.”
His voice trails off and I squeeze his hand.
“I thought I could handle it,” he says finally. “He said he loved me. That I was difficult sometimes, but he loved me anyway. And Ithought—well, love’s supposed to hurt a bit, isn’t it? Everything else in my life did.”
My heart stumbles. That logic—that love equals pain equals love—is carved into too many of us.
He laughs, but there’s no joy in it.
“Did you ever find your dad again?” I ask.
“No,” he says simply. “Part of me wanted to. Most of me didn’t. The last time I saw him, he looked at me like I was a bill he couldn’t pay. I figured I’d spare him the reminder.”
I stare at the ceiling too. The shape of that loss is familiar—different outline, same emptiness. My dad never left, but sometimes it felt like he wasn’t there either. And now, he never will be.
Pete turns onto his side again. “You must miss your mum,” he says.
“I don’t really remember her properly,” I admit. “Bits and pieces. I definitely remember how her laugh sounded in the car. Sometimes I think I remember how her perfume smelt. My brain kept the fragments but lost the person.”
He nods slowly. “Yeah. Same. I dream about mine sometimes. Like I know she’s there without actually seeing her face. Sometimes I think grief isn’t about missing the person—it’s about missing the version of yourself that existed when they were there.”
“That’s…” I exhale. “That’s uncomfortably accurate.”
He smiles faintly. “Sorry. I go a bit philosophical when I’m tired.”
“Please, philosophise away,” I say.
“That’s not a word.”
“It’s absolutely a word.”
He grins. “Okay, I will continue to philosophise.”
“Please do. You make trauma sound like something manageable.”
He chuckles. “It’s not, though. I still panic if someone raises their voice. I still overthink every text message, which is why I don’t send them.”
“Ah, I wondered why you were such an old-school phone user.”
“Yes, this is why,” he chuckles lightly as he speaks. “I keep spare toothbrushes for guests I don’t have, because I can’t stand the idea of anyone feeling unwelcome. My therapist says it’s ‘adaptive coping.’ I say it’s retail trauma.”
I laugh quietly. “That’s the most British diagnosis I’ve ever heard.”
He grins. “Very much so.”
There’s another pause, gentler this time. “Thanks for telling me that stuff,” I say.
He shrugs, but there’s a faint flush in his cheeks. “You don’t look away when I talk.”
That hits me harder than it should.
I think of Guy—how he used to listen, how it felt to be understood. I think of Daniel—how he made me question every memory until I barely trusted my own voice. And I think of Pete now, lying beside me, soft and open and brave enough to name the ghosts.
“I’m glad you did,” I say, meaning it.
He exhales slowly. “I just… I want calm. Not loneliness, just peace. Consistency. But also fulfilment.”
“You deserve that,” I say.
