“I’m taking a break. I don’t know for how long. I don’t know what the channel looks like when I come back, if I come back. But I wanted to be honest with you, because you’ve given me ten years of your time and attention, and you deserve better than silence. And she deserves better than a man who won’t own what he did.”
I stopped recording.
Sat in the quiet kitchen for a long time.
Then I uploaded it without watching it back, because if I watched it I’d delete it, and if I deleted it I’d never say any of it again.
Dex called within an hour. “I just watched it.”
“And?”
A long silence. When he spoke, his voice was tight. “You just told fifty million people that you destroyed a woman’s life. You took a match to everything we’ve built, Graham. Every sponsor, every partnership, every dollar. You probably just ended your career.”
“Probably.”
“That’s all you’ve got? Probably?”
“If it ends, maybe I deserve it.”
Dex was quiet for a long time. I could hear him breathing. Could picture him in his flat in Edinburgh, phone in one hand, other hand pressed against his forehead, trying to figure out how to manage a client who’d just set himself on fire on purpose.
“You’re a stubborn bastard,” he said finally. “You know that?”
“Aye.”
“Get some sleep. You look terrible in the thumbnail.”
He hung up.
I closed my laptop and went to bed.
I didn’t sleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ROSE
Maggie’s twinswere trying to eat the remote control.
Shannon had one end, Carlyle had the other, both gumming it like tiny people who’d decided this was the hill they’d die on. Drake intercepted, swapping the remote for a teething ring without breaking stride.
“Nice hands,” Maggie said from the kitchen.
“Lots of practice.” Drake settled back on the couch with a twin on each knee, bouncing them gently. He caught my eye and smiled. Warm, yet careful. The way everyone smiled at me now. Like I was made of something that might shatter if they moved too fast.
I smiled back. It felt like putting on someone else’s face.
Two weeks. I’d been in Maggie’s guest room for two weeks, and every day the room felt a little smaller.
It wasn’t their fault. Maggie and Drake had opened their home without hesitation, “Stay as long as you need, Rose, I mean it,” and they meant it. The guest room was comfortable. Theapartment was beautiful. The twins were loud and joyful and smelled like baby shampoo.
That was the problem.
Their life was so full and alive. Drake singing off-key to the babies during bath time. Maggie leaving her violin case open on the counter because she was always halfway through practicing something. The two of them trading looks across the kitchen that said entire conversations without a single word, the shorthand of people who’d chosen each other and kept choosing.
I was a ghost in someone else’s love story.
I spent most of my time in the guest room. Not sleeping, sleep and I had parted ways somewhere over Nebraska, but lying in bed with my laptop, doing things that felt productive and weren’t.
