Chapter 20
Callum
My day started just like the others since Ginny started staying with my parents. Meaninglessly. Horribly.
A true why-even-bother-waking-up-if-I-don’t-have-the-love-of-my-life kind of morning.
I woke up in our bed the next morning all alone, with a feeling of heaviness.
I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, aware of the silence and her absence.
The house felt too large around me, too hollow, too still, and every empty room seemed to breathe in a slow, steady rhythm that reminded me she wasn’t here.
Not her scent, not her warmth in the sheets, not the familiar rustle of her moving around in the early morning the way she always had.
I got up because staying in bed only made that absence louder, and the quiet pressed on my chest like a weight that wouldn’t shift.
I walked through the hall, down into the kitchen, and everything looked wrong, wrong because nothing had changed, wrong because everything had, wrong because the life we’d built together sat untouched while she healed miles away in a house full of people who were taking care of her while I failed.
I stood there for a while, holding the edge of the counter, letting my breath settle and letting the truth settle with it: she would come home eventually, or maybe she wouldn’t, but either way this house needed to be ready for her. And I needed to be different inside it.
I made myself coffee I barely tasted and decided to get to work on the idea that had popped into my head earlier. It had come to me in the early hours of the morning when sleep refused to stay, something quiet and small and maybe foolish, but still something.
Memory markers.
Small things, gentle things, reminders of where we started before everything went sideways.
One day, whenever she returned, whether weeks from now, months from now, or even longer, she might open a drawer, pick up a book, or reach for a mug and find a small piece of us waiting there.
It would not be meant as a plea for forgiveness or a promise about the future, but simply as a quiet truth that I had been thinking about her, remembering her, and trying in every small way I could to hold space for her in our home.
Without her in the home, I wanted to spend every second thinking about her. I wanted to make things right and to live in all of our happy memories.
I retrieved the first token from the drawer of my nightstand.
A tiny pressed flower, the one she didn’t know I’d kept from our first date.
She had picked it absentmindedly during the walk back to her car, rolling the stem between her fingers while talking about how she hated the endings of most romance movies, because they always stopped before the hard parts.
She laughed when she said it, and I had been too busy watching the way sunlight hit her cheekbones to answer her with anything meaningful.
I’d kept the flower anyway, flattened it in a book I didn’t intend to read again, unsure why at the time. Now it sat in my hand, delicate and papery and fading at the edges, and it felt like the kind of thing that didn’t deserve to be hidden anymore.
I placed the flower inside her favourite book, sliding it between the pages she had dog-eared long ago. I set it gently back on her nightstand, and my fingers lingered on the cover for a moment before I stepped back.
One marker.
The second was a ticket stub from a movie we’d seen years ago, a tiny scrap of paper that somehow survived three moves and a handful of arguments about clutter.
She always joked that I was sentimental and didn’t know it, and she was right about that, just like she was right about so many things I didn’t listen to soon enough.
I found a simple frame in the hall closet, the kind she used for little prints she hadn’t hung yet, and slipped the ticket inside.
I wiped the glass with the hem of my shirt, then carried it and sat it on the coffee table in the living room, imagining the way she might find it one day when she returned, perhaps tired from work or a morning run, and how the sight of it might tug at something soft inside her.
Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe she’d feel nothing but nostalgia, or nothing at all.
Two markers.
I continued on, finding small tokens that made me remember us.
A bus ticket from our trip to Vancouver.
Two slips of paper from fortune cookies that we got from a restaurant in Halifax, that both spoke of love.
A concert ticket from two years ago, when her favourite local band came out of retirement for one more show.
A photostrip from a carnival. A cork from the bottle of cheap champagne that we drank the night we moved into our house.
Seeing all of these physical reminders of our love and of our life filled me with so many conflicting feelings; happiness from the thoughts of some of my favourite memories with her, but horrible sadness from thinking about how it could all be over. My dishonesty could have destroyed everything.
I knew I couldn’t stop there, though. We stood no chance if I couldn’t be completely honest with her.
So, I started writing. I filled pages and pages, walking her through my betrayal step by step.
I wrote about my past with Ashley, how I went years without hearing from her and years without thinking about her.
How Ashley weaseled her way back into my life, and how I let her.
How somewhere along the way I developed a hero complex, convincing myself it was my responsibility to fix problems that were never mine to carry.
How I lied to Ginny. How I became deceitful and evasive.
I hoped the details wouldn’t set her back and wouldn’t cause her too much stress, but I couldn’t hide anything from her ever again.
If I wanted her to trust me again, I couldn’t have another ounce of dishonesty.
After the truth was laid bare, I started on my apology.
I told her I was sorry for lying to her, for missing her appointment, and for giving my time and attention to someone else when she needed me most. That I was sorry for the fear and loneliness she must have felt while I was lying to her face.
I wrote about the trust she had placed in me, and how easily I had broken it.
I told her I did not expect forgiveness, and that I knew an apology could not undo the damage I had caused or the danger I had put her in, but that she deserved to hear me say, plainly and without excuse, that I was sorry.
I wrote until there was nothing left to explain, nothing left to confess, and nothing left between us but the truth and the hope that, someday, it might be enough to begin again.
I wrote the words I’m sorry so many times that the words could have been imprinted on the table afterwards.
When it was done, I folded the paper and slid it into an envelope before stepping away from it.
I stood back in the kitchen, looking around the space and let myself exhale, long and unsteady.
I didn’t feel fixed. I didn’t feel redeemed.
I didn’t feel like I’d earned anything by doing this.
But the house didn’t feel as hollow anymore, and the air didn’t feel as stale, and the rooms didn’t echo quite as sharply as they had an hour earlier.
I walked through the living room and straightened a few things she always liked arranged a certain way.
I opened the windows to let in fresh air, and gathered the laundry she had left in a small pile on her chair and folded each piece slowly, carefully.
Next, I moved toward the garage for a few tools, because the loose hinge on the laundry room door had been bothering her and there was no reason to leave it unfixed any longer.
She had lived with a dozen small irritations for too long while I stayed too distracted to notice any of them.
I crouched there tightening screws with steady hands and slow breaths, and the house seemed to shift around me in a patient, watchful way that made me wonder how long it had been waiting for this kind of attention.
When the sound of the front door opening drifted through the hallway, I almost dismissed it as my imagination.
No one came by without calling. But the footsteps that followed were familiar in a way that tightened my chest, and then my father filled the doorway, taking in the room with eyes that held nothing I could easily name.
He didn’t look warm, and he didn’t look cold, and he didn’t look like a man arriving with comfort. He simply nodded once, as if this was exactly where he expected to find me.
“I figured the place could use some upkeep,” he said, his voice low and roughened by all the things he wasn’t saying. He walked past me to the hall closet, pulling out a handful of screws with the quiet efficiency of someone who knew how to step into a job without asking what needed doing.
There wasn’t an ounce of absolution in his tone, and not a trace of sympathy in the way he moved around the space.
He didn’t ask how I was sleeping, and he didn’t ask whether I’d talked to Ginny, and he didn’t pretend this moment was anything more than what it was: work that had been ignored too long finally being done.
After fixing the wobbly shelf in the closet, he knelt beside the cabinet under the sink, the one she had complained about every time it stuck, and ran his fingers along the warped frame.
“It’s bowed,” he muttered, almost to himself.
He grabbed a level from the box, not waiting for me to offer it, and I held the door steady while he adjusted the hinge.
We worked in a silence that wasn’t comfortable and wasn’t tense, a silence built from years of half-finished conversations and all the rough edges between us, and somehow it still felt steadier than trying to fill the space with words neither of us was ready to say.
We sanded the uneven lip, replaced a bracket that should’ve been swapped before, and corrected the alignment until the door finally closed with a smooth, quiet click. The sound landed with a quiet finality that settled in my chest, heavier than relief and quieter than regret.
My father stood slowly, wiping his hands on a rag while he surveyed the room. He didn’t nod or smile or give any sign he was pleased with what we’d done. He simply looked at the space with that familiar, thoughtful frown he wore whenever something had been mended but not truly fixed.
“You should patch the drywall behind the washer,” he said, tilting his chin toward the dent Ginny had pointed out a while ago. “It’ll get worse if you leave it.”
We didn’t talk about her. We didn’t talk about what I had allowed to happen. We didn’t talk about who I had been or who I was trying to become. He fixed things and I moved beside him, trying to help in small ways.
By late afternoon, the house looked slightly more cared for, and slightly less like a place abandoned in the middle of its own life.
My father gathered his tools and lingered in the doorway.
His hand rested on the frame for half a breath, steady and familiar, and the pause was almost more startling than the visit itself.
“Keep going. This is just a drop in the bucket,” he said, and the words didn’t land like encouragement or pity or judgment. They landed like a fact I already knew, something I had woken up understanding before the sun even rose.
“Dad, before you go - can you give her this when you think she would be ready to hear everything from me?” I asked, grabbing the envelope and handing it to him. He hesitated for a moment, but finally grabbed it and gave me a single nod.
Then he left, and the house folded back into its quiet, but it wasn’t the same quiet I’d started the day with.
It felt steadier, and more honest, and full of all the work waiting for me, and I stood there letting the stillness settle into my bones, knowing I couldn’t fall apart, and knowing there was no one else who could put this life back in order except me.