Chapter 46
TOM
We’re lying side by side, the duvet a tangled suggestion of order. The light outside has that flat, end-of-afternoon flare where everything looks hazy.
For a while, neither of us speaks. There’s the hum of the fridge downstairs, the tick of the radiator, the tiny sound of Buster licking his paw somewhere in the hall. It’s the kind of quiet that feels earned.
We don’t mean to end up here.
It starts with coffee. It always does. Coffee, and his half-smile when I open the door. Then coffee becomes sitting on the sofa, and sitting becomes shoulders brushing, and shoulders brushing becomes, well, gravity.
And then, I’m in bed with Pete having a wonderful afternoon of sweaty, enthusiastic sex.
Pete stares at the ceiling like he’s trying to memorise it. “Sorry, I didn’t intend for this to happen,” he says eventually.
“You’re sorry?”
“Oh no, not at all. Just one of those things I felt obliged to say,” he says, grinning.
Then he exhales. “It’s nice,” he says, eyes half-closed. “Being somewhere that feels normal for five minutes.”
Pete hadn’t mentioned the memory stick I gave back to him last time we met.
The memory stick of videos that exposed the truth of his and James’s relationship.
I wanted to ask him, to be sure that he got it back to the office before James had realised.
I presume if he had noticed there would have been repercussions and Pete wouldn’t be calmly lying next to me right now, so I assume the danger has passed.
Pete isn’t aware however that I’ve copied all the videos onto the desktop of my laptop. At some point, I’ll broach this with him, but not today. Not when we are having this blissful moment together.
Pete’s tracing slow lines on my forearm, watching the movement instead of me. “Do you miss you dad?” he asks suddenly, gentle but not hesitant.
I blink, caught off guard. “Why do you ask?”
“Curious, I suppose,” he says.
I stare at the ceiling. “I mean, yes, of course I miss him. But… it’s hard to miss him a connection that was never really there?”
“So, you weren’t close?”
“We were… complicated, he and I. He was the strong-and-silent type, and I was the talk-and-overthink type. Neither of us really understood the other. But near the end, I think we tried. We just ran out of time.”
He nods, quiet. “That’s the worst bit, isn’t it? Time pretending it’s endless until it’s not.”
There’s a lump forming in my throat. “Yeah.” I breathe out. “Mum died when I was nine. Car accident. After that it was just Dad and me, and… we didn’t know how to talk about her, so we didn’t.”
Pete looks at me for a long moment. “My mum died too,” he says softly.
Something shifts in the air between us. “Really?”
He nods. “I was eight. Some heart thing. She was in and out of hospital a lot. And then she died.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, because there isn’t anything better to offer.
He smiles faintly. “People always say that. I don’t mind. It’s nice that anyone still does.”
He rolls onto his back, eyes on the ceiling. “After she died, my dad… disappeared. Not right away. But grief got him drunk, and drunk got him mean. One night he just didn’t come back. I waited two days before someone knocked on the door.”
My chest tightens. “Oh Pete, what happened?”
He gives a humourless laugh. “Social services came eventually. I think a neighbour had seen me sitting in the window on my own for a few days. They said I was going somewhere safe. I think they believed it. At the time.”
He goes quiet for a moment, like he’s listening to the memory.
“The first foster house was fine,” he says. “Normal, even. A woman called Margaret. She baked all the time, wore slippers shaped like dogs. Then she got sick and went into hospital, and I got moved.”
His tone changes slightly—flatter, tighter. “After that, it was a carousel. New house, new rules, new strangers. Some were decent. Most were… not. You learn the difference quick. The nice ones tell you when dinner’s ready. The bad ones tell you what it costs to eat it.”
I swallow hard. “Pete…”
He shakes his head. “It’s okay. It’s a long time ago. I’m just… saying it out loud. Some of them were …” He trails off, eyes still on the ceiling. “Let’s just say, some people take in kids because they think it’ll make them look good. Doesn’t always mean they should be near kids.”
There’s a silence heavy enough to bend the room. I don’t breathe.
“By fourteen, I’d worked out how to disappear. Smile, nod, say please and thank you, don’t make a fuss. The quieter you are, the less they notice you. That’s how you survive.”
I try to imagine being ten and knowing that. It makes my chest ache.
“So, when people talk about family,” he says, “I don’t picture parents. I picture anyone who stays. Doesn’t even have to be long. Just long enough to make me think I’m not invisible.”
There’s something in that line that makes my stomach twist. I picture anyone who stays.
I stayed for Daniel, longer than I should have. I stayed because I thought leaving meant failing.
Pete keeps talking. “I met James years later, when I’d finally started to feel like an adult.
He gave me everything I wanted. Stability, security.
A face to come home to every night. Someone to wake up next to me in the morning.
There were some days where he’d spoil me rotten and I felt like the luckiest man on earth. ”
His voice trails off and I squeeze his hand.
“I thought I could handle it,” he says finally. “He said he loved me. That I was difficult sometimes, but he loved me anyway. And I thought—well, love’s supposed to hurt a bit, isn’t it? Everything else in my life did.”
My heart stumbles. That logic—that love equals pain equals love—is carved into too many of us.
He laughs, but there’s no joy in it.
“Did you ever find your dad again?” I ask.
“No,” he says simply. “Part of me wanted to. Most of me didn’t. The last time I saw him, he looked at me like I was a bill he couldn’t pay. I figured I’d spare him the reminder.”
I stare at the ceiling too. The shape of that loss is familiar—different outline, same emptiness. My dad never left, but sometimes it felt like he wasn’t there either. And now, he never will be.
Pete turns onto his side again. “You must miss your mum,” he says.
“I don’t really remember her properly,” I admit. “Bits and pieces. I definitely remember how her laugh sounded in the car. Sometimes I think I remember how her perfume smelt. My brain kept the fragments but lost the person.”
He nods slowly. “Yeah. Same. I dream about mine sometimes. Like I know she’s there without actually seeing her face. Sometimes I think grief isn’t about missing the person—it’s about missing the version of yourself that existed when they were there.”
“That’s…” I exhale. “That’s uncomfortably accurate.”
He smiles faintly. “Sorry. I go a bit philosophical when I’m tired.”
“Please, philosophise away,” I say.
“That’s not a word.”
“It’s absolutely a word.”
He grins. “Okay, I will continue to philosophise.”
“Please do. You make trauma sound like something manageable.”
He chuckles. “It’s not, though. I still panic if someone raises their voice. I still overthink every text message, which is why I don’t send them.”
“Ah, I wondered why you were such an old-school phone user.”
“Yes, this is why,” he chuckles lightly as he speaks. “I keep spare toothbrushes for guests I don’t have, because I can’t stand the idea of anyone feeling unwelcome. My therapist says it’s ‘adaptive coping.’ I say it’s retail trauma.”
I laugh quietly. “That’s the most British diagnosis I’ve ever heard.”
He grins. “Very much so.”
There’s another pause, gentler this time. “Thanks for telling me that stuff,” I say.
He shrugs, but there’s a faint flush in his cheeks. “You don’t look away when I talk.”
That hits me harder than it should.
I think of Guy—how he used to listen, how it felt to be understood. I think of Daniel—how he made me question every memory until I barely trusted my own voice. And I think of Pete now, lying beside me, soft and open and brave enough to name the ghosts.
“I’m glad you did,” I say, meaning it.
He exhales slowly. “I just… I want calm. Not loneliness, just peace. Consistency. But also fulfilment.”
“You deserve that,” I say.
He laughs properly at that, the sound lighting up the room.
For a while, we just lie there, facing each other. His eyes flicker closed and open again, sleep tugging at him but not winning yet. I want to tell him I’m proud of him—for surviving, for talking, for existing despite it all—but the words stick somewhere in my throat.
Somewhere inside that wish, my own ghosts stir: Mum humming at the sink, Dad coughing through the night, Guy’s hand in mine. They’re not gone, not really. They just live in the spaces between breaths.
Pete looks at his watch. “I need to go soon.”
I nod.
Pete shifts closer, his hand finding mine again. “Thanks,” he mumbles. “For… letting me be.”
“Always,” I say.
He smiles against the pillow, us both enjoying the calm.
Part of me wants to protect this quiet forever. Another part knows it can’t last.
But for now, I let myself believe it can.