I open my eyes. She's watching me. She can see the war on my face. She can see me breaking.
"I can't."
Two words. The smallest sentence in a language that contains millions. The one that breaks everything we built with a knock and a door and a word that meant "forever" and now means nothing.
She looks at me for a long time. Her face cycles through what's left: fury, already spent. Betrayal, already processed. Grief, held at arm's length because grieving would mean accepting that this is real. And then the worst expression I've ever seen on a human face. Resignation. The quiet acceptance of a woman who has been decided for by another man she loves and who is choosing to survive the decision rather than shatter against it.
She walks to the door. Stops. Doesn't turn around.
I see the tension in her shoulders. The way her hand tightens on the bag strap. She's holding something. Not the bag.Something inside her chest that presses against her ribs and wants out.
I could tell him. The thought doesn't reach me — it stays inside her, where it lives. Three words. I'm carrying your child. And he would drop the bag and hold me and never let me leave. And I would be safe and imprisoned and exactly what I swore I'd never become. A thing to be protected. A body carrying an heir. Not a partner. Not a person. A vessel locked in a fortress while the man who loves me decides what's best for the vessel and its contents.
She doesn't speak. She walks through the door. Doesn't look back. The way O'Briens leave buildings: under their own power, with their spines straight, regardless of what's breaking inside.
The door closes.
The penthouse is silent. The kind of silence I used to cultivate. Fifteen years of designing this space to be exactly this: empty, controlled, mine. Every surface polished. Every object chosen for function. The loneliness wasn't an accident. It was architecture.
Now the architecture is unbearable.
Her ginger tea on the kitchen counter. A hair tie on the bathroom sink. Her laptop on the couch, Ward Risk Advisory logo still glowing, a client assessment half-finished because she maintains her professional life even inside a war because she refuses to let any man dissolve her identity. The Heaney…no. I packed the Heaney. The nightstand is empty. The absence is louder than any presence.
I sit on the edge of our bed. The sheets smell like her. Like us. Like the particular chemistry of two people who chose each other against every rational argument not to. I put my head in my hands.
The right thing is keeping her alive. The right thing is removing the target from the battlefield. The right thing is military, tactical, strategic, defensible.
The right thing feels like cutting out my own heart and sending it to New Hampshire in a black car with four armed strangers.
My phone buzzes.
Lex. "She's in the car. Security confirmed. She took the Beretta. ETA four hours."
She took the Beretta. Armed. Because even now, even furious, even betrayed, she refuses to be helpless. She walks into exile carrying the weapon I taught her to use. Not surrendering. Complying under protest.
"Thank you."
I hang up. Sit in the silence of a penthouse that was designed to be everything I wanted and is now the loneliest place I've ever been.
I tell myself I did the right thing. I tell myself the right thing and the hard thing are one and that loving and that loving someone means protecting them even when they hate you for it.
But I keep seeing her hand on her stomach. The gesture she makes every night. The press of her palm against her abdomen. Protective. Instinctive. A motion I've noticed a hundred times and cataloged as habit, as comfort, as the unconscious language of a body processing stress.
A gesture I've noticed a hundred times and never once understood.
Why does she hold herself like she's protecting something?
The question forms and dissolves. I don't follow it. I should. I should chase it down and sit with it and let it lead me to the answer that has been living in plain sight since the morning she blamed bad oysters for the nausea and I believed her because I trust her and trust is the scaffolding and the scaffolding is thefirst thing that comes down when the walls are done and the building can stand on its own.
Except the building can't stand on its own. Not without her.
I sent her away to keep her safe.
So why does it feel like I just destroyed the only good thing in my life?
Chapter 31
Siobhan