"You will be," I say. "You'll always be in the room."
He looks at me. Long.
"I need to know one thing."
"Ask."
"Are you staying?"
"Yes."
"Not because she's pregnant. Not because it's the right thing."
"Because I love her." The words come out steady. Not unfamiliar anymore. Not in this room, at this table, to this man. "Because I love her and I'm staying. Whatever you can live with, Ronan. But I'm not leaving."
The clock. The candle. Billie's hand on my knee.
"Okay," Ronan says.
Not a resolution. Not warmth. Just the word, carrying everything he can carry right now.
Billie exhales beside me. The sound of a woman who's been holding her breath for a month.
The dinner continues. Ronan pours wine and asks Billie about the baby — due date, doctor, vitamins. The questions of a man who has decided to start with what he knows how to do.
Billie passes the bread. I take a piece and pass it to Ronan and our fingers brush on the basket and neither of us says anything about it.
Coats on at the door. Billie hugs her father, face against his shoulder, and he holds her with his hand on the back of her head and says something into her hair I can't hear. She nods and squeezes him once and steps back.
Ronan looks at me. The hallway, the coat rack, thirty years of goodbyes at this door.
He puts his hand out.
I take it. The same firm grip, except he holds it one beat longer than he needs to.
"Drive safe," he says.
"Always do."
26
Billie
Igo live at eight like I always do.
Normal setup. Ring light. Controller. Virtual background running, filter on, BrattyBaby loading in. Chat floods within thirty seconds — the familiar noise of it, four thousand people settling in, the community that I built from nothing in eighteen months.
I pick up my controller. I start playing.
The game is good tonight. Kill count climbing steady. Chat in the flow state. I'm running clean, hitting shots, the specific version of competent that only comes out when everything outside the game has settled enough to let me concentrate. And it has settled. Not perfectly. Not painlessly. But settled.
My dad called yesterday. Asked how I was feeling. Not about Declan. Not about the baby. About me. Just me. It was a short call. It was enough.
Declan is at the kitchen table behind me. Reading. A physical book, because he's a forty-eight-year-old man who reads physical books at kitchen tables and that's who he is. He's visible at the edge of my frame — not deliberately, not hidden. Just there. The way he's been there since I went back online.
I play for forty minutes. Good run. Chat is happy. I'm happy.
Then I set the controller down.
