Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
KATE
The first Friday night Emma drags me out, I spend forty minutes staring at my wardrobe like it’s personally offended me. Every outfit feels wrong somehow. My clothes are either too old or too young, or they make me look like I’ve put in too much effort or none at all.
I stand there in jeans and a black bodysuit with one earring in and my hair half-curled while panic and fear wrestle quietly inside my chest.
“You are aware,” Emma says from the doorway, already dressed and holding a mascara wand like a weapon, “that this is drinks in Manchester and not the Met Gala?”
I glare at her through the mirror. “I hate everything I own.”
“That’s because you’re spiralling.”
“I’m not spiralling.”
“You reorganised your spice rack alphabetically yesterday.”
I pause with my second earring halfway to my ear. “That was productive.”
“That was emotional warfare.”
Despite myself, a laugh escapes me, the sound rusty from lack of use lately.
Emma softens at hearing it. “There she is,” she says gently.
Something in my chest lightens at that, because for the last few weeks, I haven’t really felt like myself at all.
I’ve felt suspended. Like life kept moving around me while part of me stayed stuck outside that rink, watching Lukas stare at a woman and her child.
Watching everything change in real time.
I finish my makeup slowly while Emma talks about work gossip behind me, intentionally filling the room with normal conversation because she knows silence is dangerous for me lately.
That’s the thing about Emma, she never pushes too hard when I’m hurting. She just quietly refuses to let me disappear into it.
“You look hot, by the way,” she says finally.
I snort softly. “I’m thirty-five.”
“And?”
“And I think the word hot stopped applying somewhere around paying council tax.”
Emma looks genuinely horrified. “Kate, if you don’t stop talking about yourself like you’re ninety,”
“I’m just saying,”
“No. Listen to me carefully.” She points the mascara wand directly at me again. “You are beautiful. Men still stare at you constantly. One very attractive hockey player literally fell in love with you.”
Pain moves swiftly through me at the word love. It’s sharp, and I’m still healing badly.
Emma sees it, and her expression alters. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I swallow before reaching for my handbag. “I’m okay.”
That part is almost true now. Not fully, but more so than before.
The worst of it has settled into something quieter lately. The first week after Lukas ended things had felt terrifyingly familiar in all the wrong ways. Like being abandoned all over again. As though I was standing in the wreckage of something I genuinely believed might last.
Except this time, nobody had lied to me. Lukas had looked shattered when he let me go. That’s the part that made moving on so difficult, because I understood why he did it. But understanding someone doesn’t stop them from breaking your heart.
The bar Emma takes me to is loud enough that thinking becomes difficult, which I suspect is intentional on her part. Music pulses through the crowded room while groups of people spill around small tables, balancing cocktails and chips and badly hidden relationship drama.
For the first hour, I mostly let Emma talk while I nod in the right places and laugh occasionally. I sip wine slowly while trying to remember what it feels like to exist as something other than someone who is hurting quietly.
At some point, a man buys us drinks. Emma immediately accepts them because she’s chaotic. I immediately panic because apparently, I’ve forgotten how flirting works.
“He keeps looking at you,” Emma says under her breath.
“I don’t care.”
“That’s not the point.”
I glance reluctantly toward the bar where the guy smiles briefly. He looks perfectly normal and relatively attractive. But absolutely nothing happens inside me. There’s no flutter or heat, no instinctive pull. All I feel is a kind of polite indifference.
The realisation lands heavily, and Emma notices.
“Oh,” she says softly.
“Yeah.”
Because the problem isn’t that I can’t move forward. It’s that part of me still belongs somewhere else.
Later that night, after Emma drops me off at home and Hudson shouts a distracted hello from upstairs without looking away from his headset, I slowly wash my makeup off in the bathroom mirror.
The house feels calm tonight.
I’m learning how to exist inside my own life again instead of simply surviving it. Work helps a lot with keeping me in a routine and focused. Hudson helps in his own way. Some mornings, I even go whole hours without thinking about Lukas, and it’s starting to feel a little like progress.
Other times, though, he appears in my head so vividly that it steals the breath from my lungs. It’s the sound of his laughter and the way his French accent thickens when he’s tired.
No, not tonight.
I head downstairs instead, tidying the kitchen pointlessly before finally curling up on the sofa with my phone balanced against my knee.
That’s always the dangerous part of the evening now. It’s the quiet loneliness that creeps in.
My thumb hovers over our message thread before I stop myself. I shouldn’t because there’s no point anymore. But I open it anyway.
The last message still sits there. It feels like we’re strangers now, trying desperately not to acknowledge that we once meant everything to each other.
My chest tightens, and before I can stop myself, I delete the thread completely. The screen clears instantly.
Gone. Just like that.
I stare at the empty space afterwards, breathing unevenly. It feels strangely good, healthy almost, but definitely necessary.
I lock my phone firmly and place it face down on the coffee table before standing abruptly.
Tea. I need tea. Or therapy, possibly both.
By the time the kettle boils, I’ve almost convinced myself that deleting the messages was the right thing to do. A clean break. A mature decision.
Then I sit back down on the sofa, unlock my phone and open the folder for my recently deleted messages. And restore every single message.
“Oh my God,” I whisper to myself. “I’m that pathetic girl now.”
But the thought of losing them had made panic rise so fast in my chest. Because those messages are proof, proof that it happened. That someone looked at me like that again after years of believing nobody ever would.
I curl further into the sofa, tea warming my hands while the rain taps quietly against the road outside.
I’ve spent weeks rebuilding myself around those things again. Slowly reclaiming pieces of myself that existed before Lukas arrived and turned my carefully controlled life upside down.
And most days now, I think I’m doing okay. Until I see him on the TV during a match, Hudson insists on still watching. Or I accidentally stumble across reminders that he still exists somewhere beyond my heartbreak.
My phone buzzes with an Instagram notification while I’m halfway through my tea. Normally, I ignore them. Tonight, I don’t. And that’s my first big mistake.
The Panthers’ account has uploaded post-game photos from tonight. I should scroll past, but instead I click on each one.
The first few photos are harmless enough. Players celebrating. Fans. Callum grinning like an idiot beside the goal crease.
Then I swipe again, and there he is. Lukas walking through the arena corridor after the game with Félix asleep against his chest. One strong arm supporting him carefully. His head bent slightly toward the little boy tucked safely against him. His exhaustion is visible even in a photograph.
The love visible too.
The caption says something stupid about the Panthers’ smallest mascot. I don’t even fully register it, because suddenly I can’t breathe properly.
Emotion crashes into me so unexpectedly that tears spill before I even realise I’m crying. “Oh God,” I whisper shakily. I press my hand hard against my mouth as another sob escapes anyway.
He looks tired and overwhelmed, carrying the weight of the world, but happy. And Félix looks so safe with him.
The grief that hits me isn’t jealousy, it’s mourning. For what almost existed. For the version of us that never got the chance to survive this.
I stare at the photo through blurred vision, tears slipping helplessly down my face, while upstairs Hudson laughs loudly at something through his headset, completely unaware that his mother is downstairs, breaking apart over a man she’s desperately trying to let go of.
And the worst part is, even now, looking at Lukas holding his son like that, I still love him.