Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Kieran
Manchester hadn’t changed.
The sky was still the same flat grey, the kind that never quite decided whether it was going to rain or not. I’d walked out of Piccadilly Station and straight into a taxi, functioning on autopilot. The landscape was nothing more than a blur as we sped along.
My mind was still in Berlin.
We pulled up outside my building, and I paid the driver. I stepped out of the taxi and stood for a moment on the pavement, my suitcase at my feet, my keys in my hand. Everything seemed exactly as it had been when I’d left.
Except that wasn’t true. Something felt… off. Misaligned. On the surface, everything worked, but underneath, nothing fit in quite the same way.
I let myself into the flat, then set my bag down inside the door and closed it behind me. Just like that, I was back, and the space was too quiet.
“Alexa, play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.”
Seconds later, the familiar melody filled the air, and I breathed a little easier. During the flight, waiting for the train, the taxi ride, I’d been turning over the events of the past two weeks, and I’d finally arrived at a conclusion I was happy with.
Not everything needs to be resolved. Some things—some feelings—can exist exactly as they are, unfinished, uncertain, but nevertheless real.
I resisted the urge to check my phone. No messages had come through, and I told myself it didn’t matter.
If he wants to reach out, he will.
And if he didn’t?
That would tell me all I needed to know.
When the ping sounded, my heart skipped a beat. I unlocked my phone and—
Of course it was Karl.
Karl: Did you make it back in one piece?
I laughed. “Yeah,” I muttered. “Course you’d check.” I typed back.
Me: Alive. Just about. Manchester is exactly as grey as I remember. Unfortunately.
The reply came quickly.
Karl: Ah, I remember it well. And I don’t miss it.
I smiled at that, then flopped onto the couch. At some point I needed coffee, but it could wait.
Me: You were right, by the way.
Three dots appeared almost immediately. Paused. Disappeared. Then—
Karl: That’s reassuring. But about what?
Me: Berlin wasn’t just a convenient trip.
A second later, my phone rang, and I clicked answer.
“Kieran.”
“Hi.” I pushed myself upright on the couch, more alert than I’d been a second ago.
“You sound as though you’re thinking too much—again.”
I let out a short laugh. “Would I be me if I wasn’t?” I dragged my hand through my hair. “I’ve had a bit of time to think.” All the way home, in fact.
“I gathered,” he said dryly. “So… you finally see Berlin wasn’t just a trip?”
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, staring at nothing in particular. “It was… more than that. With him.” I paused. “With Stefan.”
Karl didn’t interrupt.
I exhaled slowly. “I think I know now what it was. What it meant.”
“That sounds promising,” Karl murmured.
“Stefan is—” I stopped, searching for the right word. “He’s very clear about who he is. What he does. How he lives his life.”
“Yes. That much I gleaned from our dinner together.”
“He doesn’t drift into things,” I went on. “He doesn’t get swept up. Everything is deliberate. Chosen.”
Karl made a quiet sound of agreement.
“And when I arrived in Berlin, I was all over the place, trying to figure things out.” I huffed a breath. “He gave me space to do that. He let me explore things I hadn’t even admitted to myself before. Without pushing. Without—” I searched for it. “Without taking advantage of it.”
Karl was quiet.
“That mattered,” I said. “More than I think I realised at the time.”
“Yes,” he said softly.
I swallowed. “But that doesn’t mean what we had was…” I trailed off, then forced the word out. “Sustainable.”
There was the word I’d been building towards.
“Go on,” Karl said, his voice low.
The fact that he was listening, not judging me, spurred me on to bare my soul. Because Karl was probably the one person who could understand.
“He knows what he wants,” I said. “And more importantly, he knows what he doesn’t want.
He… he doesn’t do complications. Or at least, not emotional ones, not in a way that changes his life.
” I stood, pacing once across the room before turning back.
“And I can’t be something that just fits into the edges of that.
I don’t think I could do that. Not now.”
Not with how I feel.
I didn’t need to say that part.
“I have my own life here,” I went on quickly. “My career, everything that’s been on hold. I can’t just walk away from that. And he wouldn’t ask me to.”
“No,” Karl said. “He wouldn’t.”
“Exactly.” I seized on that. “So there’s no version of this where it actually works, not properly, not in a way that—”
I stopped.
Because I could hear it now, the neat, logical, argument that completely missed the point.
Karl let the silence sit for a moment before asking in a gentle voice, “And how do you feel about him?”
The question landed like a weight, simple, direct, and impossible to sidestep.
My shoulders sagged as something in me gave way.
“I fell for him. I didn’t say it,” I added. “Back there, I could have. There was a moment.”
“I suspected as much.”
I smiled at that. “Yeah. Well.” I ran a hand over the back of my neck. “I didn’t want to put him in that position.”
“What position?”
“The one where he’d have to respond. Where silence wouldn’t be enough anymore. Where he might feel like he had to say something back, or explain, or—” I shook my head. “That’s not who he is.”
“And you didn’t want to force him to be someone he’s not.”
“Exactly.”
Karl was quiet for a moment. “And you?”
I frowned. “What about me?”
“Is that who you are? Someone who says nothing, to avoid making things inconvenient for someone else?”
I opened my mouth to respond, then clammed up. That wasn’t what I’d expected.
“I’m not—” I began, then faltered.
Because I had done that. I’d chosen not to speak, to leave things as they were.
To protect him from something I hadn’t been sure he wanted.
“I just didn’t want to make it awkward.” The words sounded weaker than I’d intended.
Karl hummed softly. “Yes, that would have been the real tragedy.”
I huffed out a sound somewhere between a laugh and sheer frustration. “You know what I mean.”
“I do. I’m just not convinced it’s the whole story.”
I sank back onto the couch, staring at the ceiling. Because neither was I, not really.
Not anymore.
“I think—” This part felt harder to say, more exposed. “I think I knew what the answer would be,” I said at last.
Karl didn’t interrupt.
“I think I knew he wasn’t ready to make that kind of choice,” I went on. “And I didn’t want to hear that out loud.”
There it was, the ugly, honest, unavoidable truth.
Karl’s breath filled my ear. “That sounds more like it.”
I closed my eyes. Yeah, it did.
“But that doesn’t change anything,” I said after a moment, my voice steadier now. “It still wouldn’t have worked. Not like that. Not now.”
“No,” Karl agreed.
I opened my eyes, frowning. “You’re not going to argue with me?”
“Oh, I could,” he said lightly. “But what would be the point?”
“That I’m right?”
“That you’re trying to be,” he corrected.
I let out a sigh. “Yeah, that.”
Karl’s voice softened. “It mattered. That’s the part you don’t get to minimise.”
“I’m not,” I said quickly.
“No,” he replied. “You’re just organising it.”
That hit closer than I liked, but I didn’t respond, because I didn’t have anything to argue with.
Karl let the silence stretch for a moment longer. “So…What are you going to do about it?”
I stared up at the ceiling again. I thought about the empty space beside me, the quiet… the absence of him.
“Nothing.”
Karl didn’t challenge it. “Fine. Then don’t.” He paused. “But don’t pretend that’s the same as it not mattering.”
I let out a slow breath. That was the part I couldn’t escape.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I know.”
Another pause. “Your meeting is tomorrow morning? At the college?”
“Yes. Ten o’clock.”
“Then you should get some sleep. You need to be alert. And the next time we speak, you will have your life back.”
I loved the ring of confidence in his voice. I closed my eyes for a moment, letting his words settle.
My life back.
It should have felt reassuring, like something solid to return to. And part of me wanted to believe that, to be able to step back into it cleanly, neatly, as if the last two weeks had been something contained, something separate.
Nothing more than a deviation.
But even as I murmured, “Yeah… I will,” I knew that wasn’t true.
The life I was going back to—the one that had been waiting for me—didn’t quite fit the same way.
Not after Stefan.
Not after what I’d let myself feel.
I don’t just want more from life. I want something different.
And I didn’t know yet what that looked like, or where it would lead.
The quiet of the flat settled around me again.
“I’ll call you after the meeting,” I promised.
“Good. Try to get some rest.”
“I will.”
We said goodbye, and the line went dead.
I let the phone fall onto the cushion beside me and lay there for a moment, not moving, not thinking in any structured way, but aware of the shift in me, the space I was in.
My life was waiting for me, that much was true. But for the first time, I wasn’t sure I wanted it back. Not as it had been, at any rate. Not without… change.
I turned my head, my gaze drifting to the piano across the room.
I wondered what my life will sound like tomorrow.