Because I don’t know how to take it back if she doesn’t feel the same.
“I don’t ever want you to think I’m ashamed of you,” I say quietly. “Because I’m not.”
I never could be.
Not in this lifetime.
Not in any version of it.
Chapter 13
Christina
“Idon’t ever wantyou to think I’m ashamed of you,” he says quietly. “Because I’m not.”
The words settle somewhere deep inside me, displacing something that had been sitting there longer than I wanted to admit.
Shame.
It had never felt like the right word. Too heavy. Too deliberate. And yet it had lingered anyway, unwelcome and persistent, attaching itself to moments I hadn’t known how to interpret. The space he created when other people appeared. The way his hand would leave me without explanation. The carefulness.
Not rejection.
Not quite distance.
Just enough absence to make me question what had been there before.
Now, hearing him say it aloud, I realise how much weight I’d given to something that had never actually been spoken.
He isn’t ashamed of me.
The certainty in his voice hadn’t sounded rehearsed or defensive. It hadn’t sounded like reassurance offered out of obligation.
It had sounded like truth.
I lean back against the counter behind me, staring at nothing. My fingers rest loosely against the wood, grounding myself in something solid while everything else shifts into new alignment.
I think about the way he’d said my name the first time he kissed me. Like it mattered. Like I mattered.
I think about him standing in the garden at the Manor, sleeves rolled up, hands steady on something broken until it worked again.
I think about the quiet way he exists in the world, never asking for space but never quite believing he’s entitled to it either.
He had told Arthur.
Not because he had to.
Because he wanted to.
Because Phil doesn’t offer pieces of his life lightly.
The doubt I’d been carrying doesn’t disappear all at once. It loosens. Unravels slowly, like something that had never been tied properly in the first place.
I realise he’s still waiting.
He hasn’t spoken again.
He’s given me the truth and stepped back from it, the way he always does. Never forcing. Never demanding.