"He's wrong. You know that, right? Whatever he said—the arrangement being over, you being free to move on—that's a man pushing away the best thing that's ever happened to him. And he's going to figure that out. The question is whether you'll still be there when he does."
I didn't answer. Took another drink of terrible wine and leaned against my best friend in an empty apartment that smelled like paint.
Outside, the city hummed. Cars passed. A siren wailed in the distance and faded.
I was twenty-three years old and heartbroken, and the only roof over my head was one I'd come back to by default, not by choice.
But I was here. And Mika was here. And tomorrow was a word that still meant a thing, even when tonight felt like the end of the world.
eighteen
CALLUM
The apartment was full of her.
I stood in the doorway at ten-forty-seven on a Friday night, keys in hand, and caught the evidence of Willow Monroe the way I'd break down a building after structural failure—methodically, room by room, noting every point of impact.
The owl mug on the shelf behind the kitchen island. The hair tie on the bathroom counter. Her pillow, still bearing the impression of her head, on what had become her side of the bed—left side, always left, one arm tucked under the pillow, the other reaching for me in her sleep.
Her shampoo in the shower. The cheap stuff. Drugstore brand, strawberry-scented, in a bottle she'd wedged between my expensive European products with zero concern for the aesthetic disruption. I'dcomplained about it once. She'd told me my shower needed more personality and less pretentiousness.
The Le Corbusier book from the flea market, water-stained and beloved, sitting on my nightstand where I'd left it after reading a chapter in bed while she curled against my side.
I stood in my apartment and felt the architecture of loss in every square foot. Not the dramatic, catastrophic kind—not the earthquake or the flood. The quiet kind. The kind where a person removes themselves and the rooms remember, and you're left standing in the negative imprint of their absence.
I'd done this.
Not Jessica. Not Eleanor Ashford and her calculated seating chart. Not the Riverside contract or the arrangement or the seventeen-year age gap.
Me. I'd done this. Stood in a parking lot with the woman I loved and told her she was free to go, as if freedom was what she'd been asking for, as if "free" wasn't just another way of saying "I'm a coward who can't fight for you."
I set my keys on the counter. Loosened my collar. Sat on the couch—her end, where the cushion still held the shape of her—and stared at the ceiling until the city went quiet.
I didn't sleep.
Saturday.
I didn't leave the apartment.
Graham called at eight. I watched the phone ring, screen-up on the kitchen counter, his name pulsing with the insistence of a man who expected answers. I didn't pick up.
He called again at nine-fifteen. Then eleven. Then one-thirty, followed by a text:Pick up the phone or I'm coming over. Your choice.
I didn't pick up the phone. I also didn't doubt he'd come over. Graham Thornton was the most patient man I'd ever met, right up until he wasn't, at which point he became a battering ram in business casual.
I spent the morning at the drafting table.
Not working. Sitting. Staring at the Elm Street plans spread across the surface—the warm-stock paper, the pencil lines, the L-shaped coffee bar and the reading nook and the community board framed in reclaimed wood. Every line on this paper had been drawn by a man who was building a future for a woman who hadn't asked for one.
The irony was exquisite. I'd spent six weeks designing a building around Willow's happiness, and in one evening I'd demolished the only structure that mattered—the one between us.
Why hadn’t I been honest? Why had my mouth refused to say the words that would’ve made everything better?
Maybe because a part of me was scared Jessica was right and in the end, Willow would be the one hurt.
It was better to cut ties now before things became irrevocably fucked.
I traced the coffee bar layout with my finger. The espresso station at the bend. The dedicated circuits. The kitchen designed for a woman who led with her left hand and turned counterclockwise. I'd memorized her patterns. Filed her offhand comments. Catalogued her dreams with the same obsessive attention I gave to load calculations and material specs.
