She woke up on his sofa.
The room was quiet and pale with early light and she was covered with a blanket she didn't remember pulling over herself. For a disoriented moment — just a moment — she was somewhere else entirely. The Reid house, a Sunday morning, the smell of coffee coming from the kitchen.
Then she remembered everything.
She sat up. Callum was in the armchair across from her, asleep — not comfortably, in the specific upright way of someone who had chosen to stay close rather than go to bed. He'd fallen asleep sitting up, his head tilted slightly, one hand still loosely holding his phone.
She looked at him for a moment.
Then she got up quietly and went to the kitchen and made coffee.
She found everything in the same places it used to be — the coffee in the left cupboard, the filters above it, the mugs on the open shelf to the right. Either Callum had put things back without knowing why, or some instinct had placed them where they'd always been.
She didn't examine that too closely.
She made two cups and carried them back.
He was awake when she returned — sitting up straighter, looking like a man who'd just realized he'd fallen asleep in an armchair and was deciding how to handle that with dignity.
She set his coffee on the side table without comment.
"Thank you," he said.
"The police will want to move on Richard today," she said. Back to the practical. The practical was safe. "Garrett said Detective Singh will contact him this morning."
"Do you want to be there?"
"No." She wrapped both hands around her mug. "I said what I needed to say last night. The rest of it is the law's business."
He nodded.
They sat in the early morning quiet of the house — the house that used to be theirs, that had belonged to someone else's version of their life for two years, that felt now like a place in between.
"I should go," she said.
"You don't have to."
"I know." She looked at him. "That's why I should."
He understood. She could see him understand it — the particular discipline of two people who have too much history and not enough resolution to trust themselves with early mornings and coffee and the specific intimacy of having stayed.
"Session is Thursday," he said.
"I know."
She stood. She picked up her bag from where she'd dropped it by the door last night. She looked once more at the photograph on the mantelpiece — both of them barefoot, her face turned up, the beach and the light and a moment neither of them knew was being kept.
"Callum," she said.
"Yes."
"Last night." She didn't look at him. "Thank you for not making it into anything it wasn't."
"It was what it was," he said simply. "You needed somewhere to land."
She nodded once.
She went home.
— ✶ —
Mara was at her apartment when she arrived. She'd apparently used the spare key Elara had given her two years ago and was sitting on Elara's kitchen floor with a bowl of cereal, reading something on her phone, looking entirely unbothered by the fact that she'd let herself in.
"You didn't come home last night," Mara said.
"Observant."
"Where were you?"
Elara set her bag down. She sat at the table. She told Mara about Richard.
Mara set the cereal down very slowly.
"Richard," she said. "Your Richard."
"Yes."
"Your brother Richard who cried at your wedding."
"He didn't cry."
"He had wet eyes, Elara, it counts." Mara pressed her hands flat on the floor. "And after everything — he said nothing? For two years?"
"He said he was protecting me."
Mara stared at her. "I want to say something extremely impolite right now."
"I know. Don't."
"Can I think it very loudly?"
"Yes."
Mara was quiet for a moment, thinking it very loudly. Then: "And where did you spend the night?"
Elara looked at the table.
"Elara."
"His sofa."
A long pause.
"The house?" Mara said.
"Yes."
"And?"
"And nothing. He sat in an armchair and I cried on his sofa and we had coffee this morning and I came home."
Mara looked at her steadily. "And Nathan?"
Elara didn't answer.
Mara's expression shifted — not to judgment, but to the careful look of someone who loves you enough to say the hard thing.
"You need to be honest with yourself," Mara said gently. "Not with me, not with them. With yourself. Because right now you have a man who loves you cleanly and a man you love messily and the only person who gets hurt by the confusion is you."
"I know," Elara said.
"Do you?"
"Mara—"
"You went to his house," Mara said. "Last night, after the worst news of your life, the person you went to was Callum." She held Elara's gaze. "I'm not telling you what that means. I'm just asking you to notice it."
Elara sat with that.
Her phone buzzed. Nathan: *Heard about Richard. Are you okay? I'm here if you need me.*
She read it.
She put the phone face-down.
She looked at the sunflowers still on her counter — forty-seven of them, slightly past their peak now but still there, still yellow.
"I don't know what I'm doing," she said."Yes you do," Mara said. "You're just afraid of what you know."