Peter’s face flashed through my mind.
The picture. The blood smeared across the wall behind him.
Help.
I waited for it to hit me, really hit
me—devastation, grief, rage. Something big and consuming, that would knock me sideways and prove I was still the person I was supposed to be.
But all I felt was numb, like the part of me that was supposed to break had already been broken a long time ago.
I stared at the floor.
I was thirty years old.
In four years, I’d never told him I loved him.
Not once.
Not because I didn’t care. I cared. I cared about him in ways I couldn’t even articulate to myself, let alone to him.
But I couldn’t say it.
The words had always gotten stuck somewhere between my chest and my throat, caught in a place I couldn’t reach. Like the connection between what I felt and what I could express had been wired wrong from the start. Like something inside me had never learned how to do that one simple thing that everyone else seemed to manage without thinking.
What kind of person does that?
What kind of person spends years beside someone—shares a bed with them, eats dinner with them, builds a life with them—and never once gives them that?
I let out a slow breath.
Perhaps he’d known, anyway. Possibly he’d seen it in other things: the way I made his coffee without asking, the way I always checked the locks twice because it bothered him when I didn’t, the way I stayed, even when staying was hard.
Or maybe he hadn’t.
Maybe he’d spent years waiting for something I would never give him. But to be fair, he never said it either. Maybe that’s what drew me to him in the first place—he was broken in the same way I was.
Now he was gone. I’d never get to say it, never get the chance to untangle our shitshow of a relationship. My chest ached with the weight of it. In all honesty, we would have ended soon, anyway. But that didn’t mean I wanted him dead. Didn’t mean I wanted him unhappy.
This wasn’t the time for grieving, so I focused on the now.
I looked up.
Callan stood with his back to me, leaning against the counter while the coffee brewed. His posture was rigid. His head was down. His hands were braced on the edge of the steel countertop.
He looked tired.
Not just physically. Not just the stiffness and the terrible night’s sleep.
Worn. Deeply, thoroughly worn. Like someone who had already lost everything once and had just kept going because stopping wasn’t something he knew how to do.
“What do you think is happening?” I asked quietly.
He didn’t answer right away.
The coffee machine hissed, dripped, filled the silence with its small, steady sounds. Without turning around, he said, “Whatever it is, it’s bad.”
Simple. Honest. True.