Chapter 18
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'd complained 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.
And when she'd stood in front of me and asked me to tell her what she was to me—use actual sentences, she'd said, as if the problem was vocabulary and not the twenty-year emotional concrete I'd poured over every vulnerable inch of myself—I'd choked.
Not "choked" in the colloquial sense. "Choked" in the structural sense. A pipe under excess pressure, clogged with the accumulated debris of a lifetime spent avoiding the exact conversation she was trying to have.
She'd asked me to be brave. I'd been a coward instead.
The arrangement is over. I got what I needed. You're free to move on.
I'd said it with the same tone I used to deliver project updates. As if I were reporting on a timeline adjustment and not detonating the best thing in my adult life.
Elena had mapped this pattern with painful accuracy. You go all-in and then the second it gets hard, you disappear back into work. She'd been describing a behavioral blueprint she'd watched me execute for twenty years, and I'd stood there and absorbed it and promised myself I'd be different.
That promise had lasted approximately six days.
My phone buzzed. Not Graham this time. Elena.
Dad. Graham called me. Are you okay? He said you’re not answering your phone.
I stared at the screen. My daughter. Twenty years old. Calling me to check on me because it wasn’t like me to just disappear. I typed back: I'll call you tomorrow.
That's not an answer.
I know.
Dad.
I set the phone face-down and went back to staring at blueprints for a building that might never become anything more than pencil on paper.
Sunday morning. Graham used his key.
I heard the lock turn at nine-twelve, followed by footsteps in the hallway, followed by a pause—the particular silence of a man assessing a situation before engaging.
"Callum."
I was at the kitchen island. Coffee in front of me, untouched and cold. I'd showered, which felt like an accomplishment. I had not shaved, which was a departure significant enough that Graham's eyebrows rose a full centimeter.
"You look like shit,” he said.
"Thank you."
"When did you last eat?"
"I had coffee."
"That's not food."
"It's a food-adjacent beverage." I pushed the mug away. "You didn't need to come."
"You didn't answer your phone for thirty-six hours.
That's either a medical emergency or an emotional one, and since you're upright, I'm guessing it's the second.
" He pulled out the stool across from me and sat.
No coffee. No pleasantries. Graham in intervention mode was a streamlined operation.
“I’m confused. We should be celebrating right now. What happened?"
I eyed him with suspicion. “Did you know Jessica was going to be at the Ashford’s?”
Graham was aghast. “No, absolutely not. I would’ve give you a heads up. What happened? Something go down between you two that I missed?”
“Not between me and Jessica…between Jessica and Willow.
" I turned the cold mug in my hands. "Said the things Jessica says—that I choose work over people, that I'll never change, that Willow's wasting her time.
And Willow confronted me about it. Asked me what she was to me now that the contract's signed. "
"And?"
"And I told her the arrangement was over. That she was free to move on."
Graham stared at me. The stare lasted long enough to be uncomfortable, which was the point.
"You're an idiot," he said.
"I'm aware."
"No, I need you to hear this, Callum. You are an idiot.
Not a well-meaning idiot. Not an accidentally-said-the-wrong-thing idiot.
A calculated, self-sabotaging idiot who had a woman standing in front of him asking to be chosen and decided to run the same play he's been running since Clinton was president. "
I deserved every word of that. "I know."
"Do you? You know what you did? You proved Jessica right. Every rotten thing she said about you—that you'll always choose work, that you'll bail when it gets real—you confirmed it in real time. In front of the woman you're in love with."
"I'm not—"
"Don't." Graham held up a hand. "Don't insult my intelligence.
I've watched you design a coffee shop for this woman in secret.
I've watched you drive to Elm Street on your lunch break and come back with sawdust on your shoes and a look on your face I haven't seen in fifteen years.
You're in love with her. The building proves it.
The plans prove it. The fact that you haven't slept in two days proves it.
" He dropped his hand. "So let me ask you a question, and I want an honest answer. What do you want?"
The apartment was quiet. The city hummed beyond the windows. My cold coffee sat between us, a prop in a conversation I'd been avoiding my whole life.
What did I want?
I wanted Willow Monroe on my kitchen island, bare feet swinging against the cabinets, stealing my coffee and critiquing my wardrobe.
I wanted her in my bed, reaching for me in her sleep, her strawberry shampoo on my pillowcase.
I wanted Saturday mornings at flea markets and cannoli in cramped bakeries and the sound of her laugh—the real one, the unguarded one—bouncing off my pristine walls and leaving marks I'd never want to remove.
I wanted to build her a coffee shop. Not as a grand gesture. Not as a transaction. As proof that I saw her. That her dreams were worth a foundation and four walls and a roof, and that I was capable of constructing a life around a person instead of around a career.
I wanted to be the man she'd defended to Elena. The one who kept her photo half-hidden behind the lamp. The one who played piano again. The one who was trying.
I wanted to be different than the man who drove away.
"I want her," I said. "I want Willow."
"Then what are you doing sitting in this apartment feeling sorry for yourself?"
"It's not that simple—"
"It is that simple. You made it complicated. You took a simple thing—a woman who loves you, asking you to love her back—and you ran it through twenty years of emotional bureaucracy until it looked impossible." Graham stood. "Uncomplicate it."
He walked to the door. Stopped.