13. Callum
— ? —
Callum
I have slept alone for six years.
I have slept badly for all six.
But tonight there is a woman in my bed with a pillow wall between us - an actual pillow wall, three of them, stacked like a barricade - and I am lying on my back in the dark being destroyed by the sound of her breathing.
It’s not even particularly interesting breathing. Just ordinary, human breathing. The inhale, the exhale, the small catch when she shifts position. The sigh that means she’s not asleep either.
I’ve memorized the rhythm of it already.
This is pathetic.
I am thirty-six years old. I have built companies, managed fortunes, faced down boardrooms full of men who wanted me to fail. I have survived my mother’s expectations and my father’s absence and six years of tabloid speculation about why I’m raising a child alone and what exactly is wrong with me.
And I am being undone by the sound of a woman breathing.
“You’re awake,” she says.
I don’t startle. I’ve been listening too closely to be surprised.
“So are you.”
Silence.
“Can I ask you something you won’t answer?” she asks.
“You can try.”
There’s a rustle - her turning over, probably, finding a more comfortable position. The pillows shift but don’t fall.
“There’s no mother anywhere in this house,” she says. “Not a photograph, not a story, not a grave you take her to. Olivia’s never said one word about one.”
The question she’s not asking sits in the darkness between us.
“What happened to her?” And there it is.
I should deflect. I should give her the same non-answer I’ve given everyone for six years - it’s complicated, it’s private, it’s not something I discuss. The words are right there, familiar as my own name.
But it’s dark. And she’s breathing. And for some reason I can’t explain, I don’t want to lie to her tonight.
“There was never a wife,” I say.
“What?”
“There was never going to be one. I never planned to marry. I never wanted-” I stop. This is the door I keep locked. The one nobody in six years has had the nerve to knock on while I’m lying still enough to hear it.
“So Olivia’s mother-”
“There’s no mother to speak of. Not in the way you’re imagining.” I stare at the ceiling. “I wanted a child. I knew I wasn’t going to have one the traditional way. So I found another way.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, processing.
“That’s not what I asked,” she says finally.
“It’s all you’re getting tonight.”
She lets it sit. She doesn’t push.
Somehow, that’s worse. Because the silence keeps asking after her voice has stopped.
“Why a kid at all, then?” she asks quietly. “A man who doesn’t believe in any of it.”
This one I can answer. This one doesn’t cost me the whole truth.
“Everyone told me I’d regret her.” The words come out rough. “My mother told me I was collecting a stray. She said that. About a newborn. About my daughter.”
“What did you do?”
“I took her anyway.” I feel the memory in my chest - a hospital room, a bassinet, a baby so small I was terrified I would break her. “And she’s the only thing I’ve ever done that I’d do again.”
I hear Nichole turn over. I don’t look. If I look, I am finished.
“That’s the most honest thing you’ve ever said to me,” she says.
“I know.”
“Why now?”
“Because it’s dark.” It’s not the whole answer, but it’s true. “Because you asked. Because-”
I stop myself before I say something I can’t take back.
The silence stretches.
Sometime after two, the pillow wall collapses.
I don’t know who moved. Maybe neither of us did. Maybe it was the natural settling of bodies on a mattress, the slow migration that happens when two people share a bed and their sleeping bodies forget they’re supposed to maintain distance.
But I’m half-awake and half-dreaming when I feel it happen - the soft thump of pillows sliding, the sudden absence of the barrier, and then warmth where there was none before.
Her hand is on my chest.
Not reaching. Not grabbing. Just resting there, palm flat over my sternum, like it landed there by accident and stayed because it found something worth staying for. She’s still asleep. I can tell by her breathing, by the slack weight of her arm, by the complete lack of tension in her body.
She doesn’t know she’s touching me.
I lie there not breathing for eleven full minutes.
I count them. I count every single second, because counting is the only thing keeping me from moving, from turning, from gathering her up and doing something unforgivable.
Her hand is warm through my shirt.
Her fingers curl slightly against the fabric, like she’s holding on.
And this is the most intimate I have been with another person in six years, and she doesn’t even know it’s happening, and I would rather die than move her.
This is a contract, I tell myself. You are paying for this. You are not allowed to want it.
But her hand is on my chest, and her breathing has synchronized with mine, and I sleep better in those next few hours than I have in six years.
That is precisely the problem.
When the gray light of dawn starts to filter through the curtains, I feel her wake.
There’s no dramatic gasp, no jerk of realization. Just a slow tension spreading through her body, a gradual understanding of where she is and what she’s touching and how completely the careful distance of the night has collapsed.
Her hand is still on my chest.
She lifts her head - I feel the movement, the shift of weight - and for a long moment, neither of us speaks.
The kind thing would be to pretend I’m asleep. The easy thing. Give her an out, let her remove her hand and rebuild the wall and never mention this again.
I don’t pretend.
I open my eyes.
She’s looking at me, sleep-warm and afraid, her hair falling across her face and her hand still right there over my heart. I can feel my pulse under her palm. I know she can feel it too.
She takes her hand back.
One slow inch at a time.
“That didn’t happen,” she says.
“No,” I agree. “It didn’t.”
I’m out of the bed before either of us can call the other a liar.
In the bathroom, I grip the edge of the sink and stare at my reflection. I look wrecked. I look like a man who hasn’t slept, except that I have - I slept better than I have in years, and that’s exactly the problem.
I cannot do this.
One night of her hand on my chest, and I’m ready to burn the contract, burn the arrangement, burn everything I’ve built just for the chance to feel it again. That’s not who I am. That’s not who I can afford to be.
By evening, there’s a couch in the room that wasn’t there that morning.
It’s one of the ones that folds out into a bed, wedged along the far wall under the window, as far from the bed as the room will allow. I had it brought up while she was with Olivia. I didn’t ask permission. I didn’t explain.
When she walks in and sees it, she stops.
“What is that?”
“Where I’m sleeping.”
I don’t look at her. I’ve gotten very good, in the space of a single day, at not looking at her.
“The room stays shared,” I say. “My mother wants to count toothbrushes, she can count two. You take the bed. I’ll take that.”
I feel her staring at the couch. At me. At the space I’ve deliberately put between us.
“For appearances,” she says finally. It isn’t quite a question.
“For appearances.”
“That’s - yes. That’s probably best.”
“It’s best.”
“It’s best,” she agrees.
And we both let the lie sit there between us like a third piece of furniture.
Here is the part I do not say. Here is the true part, the part I’d burn before I’d hand it over: that I have not wanted a single thing in six years.
That wanting was a door I bricked up on purpose, because wanting gets you nothing but loss.
And that one night of her hand on my chest pulled the whole wall down in the dark.
I’m not dragging a bed across the room because of my mother.
I’m doing it because if I lie down beside her again, I will reach for her.
And if I reach for her, the year is over.
And I do not survive another year that ends.
That night, I lie on a fold-out couch ten feet from my own wife and listen to her breathe in the dark.
The couch fixes nothing.
She is still close enough to hear. I am still not sleeping. I am just a man now who dragged a bed across a room to keep from touching the one person he has let himself want in six years.
Across the dark, she says my name once.
Quietly.
Testing whether I’m awake.
I don’t answer.
It is the first cowardly thing I have ever done in this house.
I already know it will not be the last.