Chapter 43
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
ROSE
Ididn’t cry when Talia left the shop. That’s the first thing I notice.
My hands are shaking, yes. My chest feels like it’s been scraped hollow with something blunt and cruel.
But the tears don’t come. Not while I’m still behind the counter, still wearing my name badge, still surrounded by neatly stacked notebooks and postcards and the faint smell of coffee drifting in from next door.
She walked out with her lie hanging in the air like smoke, sweet and poisonous, and something inside me hardened instead of breaking.
I finish my shift on autopilot. I smile at customers. I say have a nice day like my world hasn’t just tilted again. By the time I lock up and turn the sign to closed, my jaw aches from how tightly I’ve been holding it.
Outside, the evening air is sharp and cold. I breathe it in too fast, like I’m surfacing after being underwater, and that’s when it hits me. The anger. Not the wild, flailing kind. Not panic. Not despair. Something cleaner. Sharper. She doesn’t get to do this to me again.
I don’t go home. I walk. Past the rink, past the familiar streets that feel too close to Callum by association alone.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, it’s probably Clara, checking in like she’s been doing every night, but I don’t answer yet.
I need to burn this off first, need to feel my feet hit the pavement, need to remind myself that I exist outside of him and her and the wreckage between us.
By the time I reach Clara’s flat, my hands are steadier and my spine feels straighter.
She takes one look at my face when she opens the door and pulls me inside without a word.
I break then. Just a little. Not sobbing.
Not collapsing. Just pressing my forehead into her shoulder and breathing hard while she holds me like she knows exactly how close I am to coming undone and won’t let it happen.
“She came into the shop,” I say eventually, my voice muffled. “Talia.”
Clara stiffens. “What did she say?”
I pull back and look at her and the steadiness, the lack of shock in her expression gives me permission to let it all out. I tell her everything.
The way Talia smiled like she already knew the outcome.
The way she said Callum and I were “too complicated” for something real.
The way she claimed they were on speaking terms again.
How she said she’d been invited to the weekend game as his significant other, like the phrase was a blade she wanted to twist.
“And the worst part,” I finish, my voice tight, “is that a few days ago, that would’ve destroyed me. I would’ve believed her. I would’ve gone home and replayed everything until I couldn’t breathe.”
“But you don’t now,” Clara says gently.
I shake my head. “No. I don’t.”
She sits back on the sofa, studies me for a moment, then asks, “Okay. Strip away the noise. Her. The press. The team. All of it. What do you actually feel?”
The question lands harder than anything Talia said. I open my mouth to answer and realise I don’t have a ready-made response. No script. No spiral waiting to unspool. Just a tangle of truths I’ve been avoiding because they’re complicated and inconvenient.
“I…” I swallow. “I believe him.”
Clara doesn’t react. She doesn’t pounce on it, she just waits, giving me the time I need to process what I’ve said.
I believe him. About everything, the crash and the reason he drove off instead of stopping, I believe he never meant to hurt me and none of this is his fault. It’s circumstance if you will.
“I don’t think he’s cheated on me,” I continue slowly. “Not with her. Not with anyone. When I replay that night now, not the image of her leaving, but everything before and after, it doesn’t fit. The guilt. The way he’s kept asking me to trust him. The way he looked when I walked away.”
My throat tightens, but I keep going. “And I believe his remorse was genuine. About the accident. About lying. About all of it. I don’t think any of that was fake.”
Clara nods once. “But?”
“But I don’t know if I can trust myself with him again.”
There it is. The truth that’s been circling me for days, waiting for me to stop running.
“It’s not about whether he’s capable of lying,” I say, the words coming faster now. “It’s about how easily I let him in. How completely. I built my sense of safety around him without realising it. And when it cracked, it took me with it.”
I press my fingers into my palms, grounding myself in the sting.
“If I go back now,” I whisper, “and it happens again, not the same thing, but something else, I don’t know if I’ll recognise myself on the other side.”
Clara reaches out and squeezes my hand. “That doesn’t mean you don’t love him.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s the problem.”
I don’t stay long after that. I thank her, hug her, and promise I’ll text when I get home. But instead of heading straight back, I walk again. This time with intention.
I take my camera from my bag, the old one, the one I’ve been neglecting, and let myself drift through the city as night settles in.
I photograph reflections in shop windows.
A couple arguing discreetly on a corner.
The blur of headlights on the wet pavement.
My own shadow stretched long and thin under a streetlamp.
It feels like coming back to myself.
Later, at home, I sit on my bed with my journal open. The pages are mostly blank, the pen heavy in my hand. When I start writing, it isn’t pretty. It isn’t linear. It’s just honest.
I am angry.
I am hurt.
I still love him.
Loving him doesn’t obligate me to forgive him.
Forgiving him doesn’t mean trusting him.
I write until my hand cramps, until my thoughts slow and settle into something manageable.
When I finally stop, there’s a calm clarity humming under my ribs.
I’m not ready to see him. Not his face. Definitely not his eyes, those will finish me.
Not the way my body still reacts to him like it doesn’t know how to protect me.
But I am ready to hear the truth. All of it.
Without intermediaries. Without headlines.
Without Talia’s poison layered over it. On my terms.
I pick up my phone and stare at it for a long moment before opening my messages. I don’t scroll through Callum’s unanswered texts. I don’t read the apologies again. Instead, I find Lukas’s name.
My fingers hover. Then I type.
Tell Callum I’ll talk. Not yet. But I will.
I send it before I can overthink it, before fear can talk me out of it.
The phone feels lighter when I set it down and so do I. Suddenly, since everything blew apart, I don’t feel like I’m waiting to be chosen or abandoned. I feel like I’ve chosen myself.