AUDEN CALLED CILLIAN Saturday evening when she returned to Brigid's – it was the only place that felt safe enough to talk to him. She couldn't risk Conner overhearing or asking questions, and she couldn't stomach the thought of Cillian asking where she was and having to lie in the moment.

After all, Auden had completely ghosted their last therapy appointment, and now she had slipped up at being a present parent – the one thing that Auden still held as leverage in their relationship.

Waiting had seemed simpler, more digestible. It had been easier to let herself mold back into anonymity with Conner, if only for another day. She was just a woman, and he was just a man. Nothing more, nothing less.

But you couldn't outrun reality forever.

When she finally mustered the courage to reach out, she was sitting on the edge of the guest room bed, one arm holding her abdomen while the other held her smartphone. Cillian had answered on the second ring.

"Hey, Aud," he greeted, his voice already carrying a blend of exhaustion and defeat.

"How is Kittie?" she asked without preamble, her pinky finding her mouth. She bit down on the tip of her finger, chewing absentmindedly.

Cillian exhaled through the speaker before she was met with some rustling on the other end. He murmured something unintelligible before returning to the phone. "Sorry, I was just trying to put her to bed. She's a bit out of sorts."

Auden felt her body go very still. "What do you mean?"

"I dunno, she's just acting out," Cillian replied. She could hear the soft thuds of his footsteps, caught the slight catch in his breath brought on by the exertion of walking. "She was totally fine Friday morning when I dropped her off. But now she just won't stop throwing tantrums. She's fighting me on every little thing."

"Let me talk to her."

"Well, Emma just managed to get her to sleep."

She almost laughed. "Right. I forgot you had Emma and her magical mothering abilities to solve all your problems."

Cillian didn't reply right away, just sat on the other end silently, probably trying to determine what this meant.

"Where have you been?" he asked instead, his tone dropping. "I tried calling you yesterday about this."

Auden fell back onto the mattress, her legs hanging over the edge as she stared at the ceiling. "I needed some time to think. I had my phone off."

"Well you picked the perfect moment," his sarcasm dripped.

Guilt crept up her shoulders, heavier now because she knew exactly what she'd been doing while Catherine was scared and acting out. She'd been lost in the luxury of being wanted, of forgetting her responsibilities for precious hours at a time.

"Instead of wasting time arguing," she offered, eager to move away from the last three days, "we should focus on Catherine and set up a meeting with the school."

"The earliest I can meet is Wednesday afternoon," Cillian answered. Now, she caught the sound of papers rustling in the background. He was probably in their office, working, even during conversations about their daughter. "I've got meetings all week for the new series."

"Wednesday?" Auden's voice pitched higher with frustration. "Cillian, she hit another child. This can't wait until Wednesday."

"What do you want me to do, Auden? Walk out of a meeting with funders because Catherine pushed someone on the playground? These things happen. Children fight."

As he questioned her, his defenses built themselves up, prepping for a fight, or some sort of retort about his inability to meet her expectations. It was the echo of routine, of the cycle that had somehow managed to define their life.

Except this wasn't about that – not really. No, this conversation was riddled by Auden's own culpability. The deterioration of her daughter's sanity because she wasn't around to keep it in check.

Her chest ached, throat burning though she couldn't explain why she was suddenly on the verge of tears. "She's six years old, Cill. And she's never hurt anyone before. Remember what her teacher said? About her becoming closed off? Snapping at other students? There's something wrong."

The desperation in her tone must have reached him, because when he spoke again, the edge was gone.

"Hey," he soothed. "Don't get yourself worked up. We'll sort it out. She's not a bad kid. She just... lost her temper, that's all. We both know how she gets when she's angry. I'll sit down with her tomorrow, talk it through properly. And Wednesday – we'll meet with the school and we'll sort it out. Together."

The tone transported her back six years, to those early days when Catherine was small and everything felt impossibly fragile. When Auden would stand over the crib at three in the morning, convinced she was doing everything wrong, that she was repeating the cycle she'd grown up in. Cillian would find her there, trembling with exhaustion and anxiety, and he'd pull her away from the nursery with that same steady voice.

You're not your mother, he'd whisper into her hair. You're nothing like her. Look how she reaches for you. Look how safe she feels with you. He'd known, even then, where the fear came from. Had understood that every crying fit, every tantrum felt like evidence to Auden that she was failing, that she carried some inherited inability to care for the things she loved most.

Auden closed her eyes, pressing the phone tighter to her ear. His voice had gone softer, like the man she used to lean on. The man who had once sat up with her through Catherine's first fever, who had talked her down from panic attacks about pacifiers and sleep schedules and whether she was holding the baby wrong. It made everything that much harder.

"You're a good mother, Aud," he continued. "You know that, right? This isn't about you failing her. Kids act out sometimes. It doesn't mean we're doing anything wrong. It doesn't mean you're..." He paused, and she knew he was thinking of her mother, of the stories she'd told him, about love that always felt conditional. "It doesn't mean you're repeating anything."

The tears came then, silent and hot. They fell from the corners of her eyes, wetting her ears. He still knew her, still remembered the shape of her fears even when everything else between them felt broken.

"If I could go sooner, I would. But I can't do it on Tuesday," he exhaled, phone static crackling. "RTÉ wants me for that documentary meeting, and then I've got the location scout in Kerry. But Wednesday –" he paused, steady, certain "Wednesday I'll be there. Nothing will get in the way of that."

"You promise?" The question slipped out, small and undignified, like a little girl. "I don't want this to be one of those things where something else comes up –"

"Nothing will come up."

She let this linger, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands, attempting to hide her sniffle with a cough. But even through the phone, she knew he heard it. He became an expert at cataloguing every shift in her voice, every sentence she let go unsaid. And then, unexpectedly: "Are you ready for your talk on Tuesday?"

The question caught her completely off guard. For a moment she couldn't breathe, let alone answer.

"You remember that?" she asked, her voice quieter, uncertain.

"Why would I forget?"

Because you forget everything else, she thought. Because you haven't asked about my work in months. Because sometimes it feels like you don't even see me anymore. But she swallowed all of it.

Instead, she stared at the familiar room around her — Brigid's framed photos on the wall, the pale yellow paint behind them — and felt something twist inside her chest. Such a small thing, his remembering, and yet it felt like honey against a bitter tongue.

"Right," she managed. "Tuesday night. Trinity."

"How's the preparation going?"

"It's... okay," she sighed. "I haven't had much energy to prep the way I really should, but it's too late to do anything about that now."

Cillian hummed in agreement, "What are you speaking about?"

"It's about art in the digital age, how technology is changing the way we interact with—"

"That sounds like you," he interrupted, not dismissing, but with a smile in his voice. "Right in your wheelhouse. We used to talk about that all the time."

It was recognition. The man she'd married flickered through beneath the exhaustion — the one who had once stayed up with her until dawn, listening to her talk about art, about ideas, about the things that lit her up.

"Yeah," she whispered, tears still stinging at the corners of her eyes. "You're right. We did."

They arranged the meeting for Wednesday afternoon, worked out the logistics of Emma picking Catherine up from school, and Charlie taking her to the park afterward. Normal things, practical things, but underneath it all ran the current of that brief moment of connection — the reminder that they had once known each other, had once cared about the details of each other's lives.

After she hung up, Auden continued to wallow in the gathering darkness of Brigid's guest room. The guilt had been manageable during the daylight hours, when she could lose herself in work or conversation or the mundane tasks of existing. Even when she was wrapped around another man, it remained far away from her mind.

But now, in the silence, it bloomed. The phone call had triggered what she continuously discarded. She saw Catherine's face behind her closed eyelids — not crying, not angry, just confused. The way her daughter had looked at her that last night, trusting and sleepy, asking if Auden would be able to make pancakes before school started the next day.

Auden pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes until she saw stars. The guilt was a living thing now, clawing at her ribs, making it impossible to breathe properly. She had abandoned her child. Not physically, not forever, but she had walked away from the most important person in her world because she couldn't handle her own pain. The rationalization she'd built that Catherine was better off without watching her parents destroy each other crumbled in the dark like paper in rain. What had she been thinking?

She needed to go somewhere. Anywhere. The thought of staying alone with this festering self-hatred was unbearable. She couldn't burden Brigid again. She had already given her more grace than she deserved. Couldn't call her mother, who would only remind her that abandonment was a family tradition.

There was only one person who would understand the precise shape of this guilt. Only one person who knew what it felt like to love Catherine so completely that failing her felt like a mortal wound. Only one person who might look at her without the judgment she deserved but couldn't bear.

Her fingers found her phone again before she could think it through.

[AUDEN]: can I come over?

The response came quickly.

[CILLIAN]: Yes.

No questions. No hesitation. Just yes.

Twenty minutes later, she stood on the doorstep of what had been her home for eight years. The porch light casted everything in amber, making the blue door appear black. For some reason, despite the countless number of times she had used this door, it felt unfamiliar. Disconnected from those memories, from that version of her life.

Her knuckles tapped gently against the wood. Moments later, the door swung open.

Emma stood in the doorway, her auburn curls catching the light — hair that fell in loose spirals rather than waves like Auden's. The resemblance, though, was unmistakable in the curve of her features, especially as Auden grew older. It was like looking into a crystal ball, the message undoubtedly clear: This is your future.

"Auden. I wasn't expecting you."

There was something cautious in her posture, the way she held herself slightly back from the threshold, as if ready to retreat. Her eyes carried that an alertness of someone pulled unexpectedly into a conversation they weren't prepared for, the initial politeness already giving way to a more cautious look.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Behind Emma, Auden could see Aiden sprawled across the couch, remote in hand. Her brother looked up from the television, eyebrows raised. "Aud? What are you doing here?"

The question stung more than it should have. "This is still my house. My daughter still lives here," she told them both, stepping past Emma into the hallway. Aiden shot her an apologetic smile, before turning back to the television, ultimately deciding to stay out of it. "I shouldn't need an invitation to come by."

Emma pursed her lips, a look of barely contained disappointment following. "Well, it's just that Cillian didn't mention you were coming by. We were just settling in for the evening. Catherine's already asleep."

The backhanded reproach hung in the air but Auden didn't take the bait. She brushed past Emma, heading for the stairs. "I'm going to find my husband."

She climbed the steps two at a time, muscle memory guiding her through the hallway. But instead of turning left toward their office where she knew Cillian would be working, she found herself stopping at Catherine's door. Her hand hesitated on the doorknob before she turned it slowly, stepping into the soft darkness.

Catherine lay curled on her side, one arm thrown over her stuffed rabbit, breathing deep and even. The nightlight cast gentle stars across the ceiling, the same ones Auden had picked out when they'd first decorated this room. Everything looked the same — the bookshelf filled with picture books, the art supplies scattered across the small desk, the photos of their family trips pinned to the bulletin board.

Everything except the air mattress on the floor.

Auden's breath caught as she paused. It was a thin thing, barely inflated, with worn sheets that had seen better days and a single pillow. Her pillow. The soft, down-filled one she'd left on their bed when she'd moved out. She recognized it instantly — Cillian's pillow was firm, practical, while hers had always been a cloud of comfort.

Auden couldn't help but stare at it.

Her self-reproach twisted, hard and too painful to swallow properly. She'd walked away from their life, their bed, their shared space, but Cillian had been left to sleep on the floor. It hit so much differently, seeing it in person rather than simply hearing about it.

The mattress seemed to accuse her with its very existence: This is what you left him with. This is what you left Catherine with. This is the result of your choices.

Auden forced her eyes away, stepping over the bed as if it were something ugly and vile, before she sank into the rocking chair in the corner. She pulled her knees tight against her chest and watched her daughter sleep, noting the way Catherine's face had lost some of its roundness, how her hair had grown longer, even though she had seen her days prior.

Time moved differently in the darkness. She might have sat there for minutes or hours, just breathing in the lavender scent of this room, letting the peace of Catherine's sleep wash over her until she caught the soft percussion of Cillian's footsteps echoing down the hallway. Auden caught the drift of his shadow across the sliver of light at the doorframe — a hesitation, then the quiet retreat of his steps. She didn't turn when he appeared in the doorway, didn't acknowledge his presence as he slipped into the room.

His gaze settled on her profile, unspoken questions gnawing at the tip of his tongue. Instead, she kept her eyes on Catherine, watching the delicate flutter of her daughter's fingers — once, twice — against the blanket. Even lost in sleep, Catherine knew. She could feel them both here, the fractured pieces of her world finally drawn back into orbit. Finally, impossibly, whole, if even for a moment.

Cillian opted not to say anything, just looked at her for a moment longer before moving and settling down onto the air mattress, his back against the wall, his own eyes now fixed on Catherine.

It was only then that Auden allowed herself to look at him.

In the dim light from the nightlight, he looked incredibly poetic. The lines of exhaustion that had carved themselves around his eyes seemed gentler, his graying hair practically diminished. There had always been something beautifully tragic about the way he watched their daughter sleep, as if he were memorizing her face, as if he were afraid she might disappear.

She knew that vigilant love; had lived on the other side of it. Her father had looked at her the same way once, before her mother's ghost settled too heavily in Auden's features. Before love became a wound he couldn't stop picking at.

Did Cillian see it too? When he looked at Catherine, did he trace the shape of Auden's abandonment in their daughter's sleeping face? Did he fear the ways Catherine might one day break his heart, just as her mother had to him?

History had a way of writing itself in circles, and she had already drawn the first line.

Slowly, Auden rose from the chair. Her bare feet whispered against the carpet — heel, toe, heel, toe — a rhythm that wouldn't wake Catherine but would announce her approach to him. She felt rather than saw Cillian's attention shift, the subtle change in his breathing, the way his shoulders drew back as she drew near.

The air mattress accepted her weight with the softest exhale, rubber squeaking quietly against her knees. She eased herself down with painstaking care, every muscle controlled, watching Catherine's face for any flicker of disturbance. The bed dipped incrementally under her, tilting Cillian's body just slightly toward her, gravity's gentle insistence that they belonged closer.

Her hand found the space between them first, fingers splayed against cool sheets. Then, with the kind of tentative courage that comes with knowing you might be refused, she let her pinky graze his. Just that — a whisper-soft brush of skin against skin, a question mark written in flesh. His hand didn't pull away. Instead, his ring finger shifted, just enough to meet hers, and she felt the warmth of him seep through that single point of contact.

Cillian's eyes never left her face. He drank in the way she tucked her hair behind her ear, the shallow rise and fall of her breathing, the movement of her pulse visible at her throat. He watched her like she was something fragile and dangerous all at once, something that might disappear if he blinked or stayed if he was very, very still.

The words scraped their way up Auden's throat like broken glass. "Can I lay down next to you?" Each syllable felt foreign on her tongue, a plea she wasn't certain she had the right to make, but she did it anyway. She had to.

Cillian nodded once.

She deliberately curled on her side, spine a careful wall between them. She couldn't bear to face him — not for this. The weight of his gaze would crack her open too quickly, strip away the fragile courage she'd scraped together. Turning away was cowardice masquerading as kindness, she knew. A way to steal his comfort without having to witness the cost of her selfishness written across his features.

But Cillian was the only person who knew the exact shape of her damage, who understood that her mother's abandonment lived in her bones like marrow. Cillian had been the one that had broken the habit that her father taught her that love was something you rationed, something you withdrew when it hurt too much to give freely. If anyone could make sense of the wreckage she was about to lay bare, it was him.

Even if she had forfeited the right to his understanding. Even if asking him to carry her pain now was another kind of cruelty.

The confession balanced on her tongue, ready to spill into the merciful dark where his eyes couldn't find her shame, couldn't reflect back the truth she already knew — that she was doing to Catherine exactly what had been done to her, and calling it love.

"I'm so scared that Catherine will look back at this moment and think that I just gave up on her." The words escaped before she could swallow them back, hanging in the air like an indictment. She felt the shift in the mattress as Cillian tensed behind her, heard the minute intake of breath that meant he was choosing his response. But she couldn't let him speak — not yet. The confession was a dam breaking, and she had to let it all pour out before the water turned toxic in her throat.

"I don't..." The syllable fractured against her teeth, splintering into silence. Her windpipe contracted, muscles seizing around the truth she couldn't quite voice. When the words finally came, they tumbled out in a desperate rush, each one stepping on the heels of the last. "I don't want my relationship with her to be defined by this. Whatever this pain and weakness is that I'm feeling."

She pressed her face deeper into the pillow, as if she could bury the shame there. "I can't even stomach the idea of her looking at me one day, and only seeing someone broken and bitter. Because I know how that feels." Her voice dropped to a whisper, barely audible against the cotton. "I look at my mom and I see the exact same thing and I hate her because of it."

The words kept coming, unstoppable. "And you —" Her breath hitched, catching on the edge of panic. "You can't become my father, Cillian. You can't look at Catherine and see my face and pull away from her because it hurts too much." The mattress trembled beneath her as her body began to shake. "He loved me. I know he did. But every time he looked at me, all he could see was her leaving. All he could see was what he'd lost."

Auden turned her head then, meeting his eyes over her shoulder. "He started holding me at arm's length. And I spent the rest of my childhood trying to earn back a love I'd never actually lost — I just looked too much like the person who'd taken it away." Cillian's lips parted, his eyes searching her face. "Kittie has my hair, my smile, even my expressions. She has pieces of me written all over her face. Promise me you won't punish her for that. Promise me you won't make her pay for what I've done to you."

The request ripped through her like a blade, opening something that had festered for years. The sobs that followed weren't tears — they were something rawer, more violent. Her entire body seized with them, ribs contracting, shoulders wrenching upward as if trying to escape her skin. The sound that came from her throat was barely human. The mattress shuddered under the force of her shaking.

"We can't end up like my parents, Cillian." Each word raked against her vocal cords, leaving them bleeding. "We just can't. Please." The plea disintegrated into nothing, her voice fracturing completely, leaving only the harsh rasp of her breathing and the wet sounds of her breaking apart.

His movement was fluid, inevitable — arms sliding beneath and around her like he'd been waiting all his life for her permission. The heat of his chest pressed against her spine, as his voice found her ear, low and rough: "We won't. We won't."

The instant his palms spread across her shoulder blades, something fundamental swelled deep inside her — like a lock clicking open. Her body recognized this geography: the exact breadth of his shoulders, the base of his throat where the crown of her head had rested through countless nights, the steady metronome of his heartbeat that had become her body's lullaby. She turned in his arms, pressing her face into the warm hollow of his neck, breathing him in like she was drowning and he was air itself.

"I'm sorry." The words ghosted against her lips, so faint they were more breath than sound, more prayer than apology. She pressed them into his skin like she could tattoo her remorse there, make it part of him. "I'm so sorry."

His arms contracted around her, muscles squeezing in a hug. She felt the tremor that ran through him — a full-body shudder that spoke of relief and devastation crashing into each other. His exhale was shaky against her temple. "Oh, Aud." Her name came out splintered, reverent. "My girl."

The endearment stole what little breath she'd managed to gather. When had those words last crossed his lips? When had she last deserved to hear them? The question carved itself into her chest, and suddenly she was crying harder, salt and regret spilling over her cheeks.

The space between their faces had collapsed to nothing. She could taste his breath, feel the flutter of his eyelashes against her forehead when he blinked. The air itself seemed charged with forgiveness that hadn't been earned, love that hadn't been revoked, the terrible fragility of this moment that felt like it might shatter if either of them moved wrong.

His hand lifted with trembling fingers as they mapped the curve of her cheek. His thumb moved in slow arcs across her cheekbone, collecting tears that fell faster than he could catch them. The pad of his finger was rough against her skin, callused from work, but his touch was feather-light, as if she were made of something that might dissolve under too much pressure.

"Shh," he breathed, though his own voice carried the weight of months of swallowed grief. "It's okay. You're here. You're here."

"I miss you." The words clawed their way up from the deepest part of her chest. "God, I miss you so much it feels like dying."

His eyelids squeezed shut, and she watched the tendons in his neck strain as he fought against the tide of his own breaking. When he finally looked at her again, his eyes were glass-bright, trembling on the edge of overflow.

"I know," His voice faltered around the edges at his lack of restraint. "I know it's hard, yeah? But you need to remember that I love you. Endlessly. And you need to hold onto that feeling. It is the only thing we have left."

She reached for him instinctively, her fingertips finding his chest, settling where his pulse hammered against his skin — wild, desperate, alive.

"If we love each other, then what are we doing?" she asked, her voice hissing as she tried to keep her voice down. "Why are we doing this to each other? Why are we breaking our family apart?"

"We were already broken, Auden," he murmured, his forehead dropping to rest against hers. "We just couldn't admit it."

"I used to think we were invincible," she told him. "Do you remember? When we first got married, when Catherine was born, I thought nothing could touch us. I thought we were different."

"We were different." Cillian's nose grazed against hers as he shifted his head. "For a while, we were."

"Then happened to us?"

He blinked then, eyes moving from her face, up toward to the ceiling. She felt him gathering the courage to answer, caught the slight bob in his throat as he swallowed before answering.

"We just got tired," he said finally, attention returning to her. "We got busy and tired, and we forgot how to reach for each other when it got hard."

"I reached for you." Old anger flickered in her voice like a match struck in wind. "I tried for years."

Cillian sighed, though it was shakey. When he spoke, his voice was barely breath, barely sound. "I know. I know you did. And I was so deep in my own shit, I couldn't see it. Couldn't see you drowning right next to me."

He was crying now, silent tears shimmered like glitter under the glow of the nightlight. Catherine shifted in her sleep, and they both went rigid, afraid to wake her, afraid to shatter this gossamer moment of truth that felt too precious and too late all at once.

"Do you remember?" Auden whispered when Catherine's breathing had settled back into the rhythm of deep sleep. "The night you stayed at the office until two in the morning, and I waited up for you. I made dinner, lit candles. Do you remember that night?"

Cillian's entire body went rigid against hers. "Of course. It was our anniversary." The words came out strangled, thick with self-recrimination.

The memory unfolded in her mind like a photograph she'd tried to burn but couldn't. She'd spent hours that day preparing — stopping at the market for the ingredients for his favorite pasta. She'd picked up wine from the bottle shop where the owner knew them by name. Had even bought new candles, the expensive ones that smelled like sandalwood and vanilla.

Catherine had been at Brigid's for the night, and Auden had felt giddy with the possibility of an evening that belonged just to them. She'd worn the blue dress he'd once said made her look like she was glowing, had spent twenty minutes on her makeup, curling her hair the way she used to when they were dating.

By eight o'clock, the pasta was ready, the candles were flickering, and she was checking her phone every thirty seconds. By nine, she'd moved the food to the refrigerator, the candles burning lower. By ten, she'd called him twice, gotten voicemail both times. By eleven, she'd blown out the candles and poured herself a second glass of wine, then a third.

When she'd heard his key in the door at ten past two, she'd been sitting in the dark dining room, half-drunk, still in that blue dress, mascara smudged, the cold pasta congealing on the plates in the fridge.

He'd found her there, tie loosened, hair disheveled from running his hands through it — the way he did when he was stressed. The look on his face when he'd seen the table, seen her sitting there in the ruins of her planned evening, had been devastating. Not anger, not even guilt. Just exhaustion. Pure, bone-deep exhaustion.

"Aud," he'd said, and even her name had sounded tired in his mouth. "Christ, I'm sorry. The meeting ran late, and then Michael needed—"

"It's our anniversary," she'd murmured quietly, words thick in her mouth from all the wine she had drank. "Do you remember we are married?"

She'd watched him remember, watched the realization slam into him. His shoulders had crumpled inward, and for a moment she'd thought he might collapse entirely.

"You came home and you were so tired, and I was so angry, and we just..." She shook her head. "We just looked at each other like strangers. Like two people who had accidentally ended up in the same house."

"I remember thinking you looked beautiful," his voice sounded faraway, lost in the memory. "You were sitting there in that blue dress, with the candlelight catching in your hair, and I just wanted to fall to my knees." He let out soft snort, "I wanted to apologize. But I was so fucking exhausted, and I knew I'd already ruined it."

"So you let us go to bed angry."

"And I kept letting you go to bed angry..." his thought trailed off momentarily, before his attention returned to her, his eyes more devastated than before. "That was the moment, wasn't it? When I walked in and saw you sitting there — I think I knew we were over. Not that night, maybe not for months, but... part of me knew. I couldn't come back from that."

His realization rested between them like a death certificate they'd both been afraid to sign. And she couldn't help but admit the truth too.

"When I saw you walk into that room," Auden revealed, "I felt nothing. No love, no forgiveness. I wasn't even angry. It was just empty."

Cillian said nothing. His forehead pressed harder against hers, their noses touching again, and she felt a rush of fresh warm tears slide down his cheek. For once, he didn't try to argue or explain. He just let the grief pour out of him silently, each tear a testament to what they'd buried that night.

Their mouths were so close she could practically taste him — it felt like she was like coming home. And yet, the space between their lips hummed with everything they couldn't say, both grappling with the potential of a kiss that would either heal them or destroy them completely.

In the end, though, neither moved that final inch. The pattern of it, the slow erosion of their sacred spaces, felt unbearable.

"I love you, Cillian. Even now. And I don't want to stop loving you," Her face contorted with the pain of her own sincerity, a deep furrow carving itself between her brows. Her fingers curled into desperate fists as she pressed them against his chest, feeling his heartbeat hammer beneath her knuckles. "I don't know how to stop. I've tried. I've tried to be angry enough, hurt enough, to just let go. But I can't. I can't —"

"Shh." The sound escaped him like air from a punctured lung. "Please. Please stop talking."

Before she could draw another breath, his arms shifted, came around her like a tide, until she disappeared into him entirely. One hand cradled the back of her head, fingers threading through her hair with desperate tenderness, while the other wrapped around her waist, sealing every inch of space between them. She felt herself dissolve into the hardness of his chest, into his body that still knew exactly how to hold her.

"I just want to hold you," he whispered against her temple, barely audible. "Please just let me hold you. Don't say anything else. Don't make me think about tomorrow or yesterday or any of it. Just let me have this."

His body curved around hers like armor, like he was trying to build a fortress out of flesh and bone where nothing could touch them. She could feel his tears falling into her hair, could feel the tremor that ran through his entire frame as he gathered her closer still, as if proximity alone could fuse them back together. She realized he was trying not to break down entirely.

In the cocoon of his arms, surrounded by his warmth and the scent of his skin, she realized something. This was muscle memory, cellular recognition — her body remembering what home felt like, what safety felt like, what love felt like when it wasn't twisted up with fear and resentment and the thousand small deaths of a failing marriage.

She pressed her face into the curve of his neck, where his throat connected with his chin and breathed him in, tasting salt and sorrow and something that still, impossibly, tasted like forever.

They fell quiet then, holding each other in the wreckage of what they'd been, listening to their daughter's peaceful breathing, both of them afraid to move, afraid to break whatever spell had allowed them this moment of raw truth. Outside, the world continued turning, but here, in the darkness of Catherine's room, time felt suspended, as if the universe itself was holding its breath.

After everything, Auden knew she was using Conner — wielding his desire like a salve against wounds that wouldn't heal. Every hungry look he gave her, every breathless confession of want, she collected like evidence in a trial where she was both prosecutor and defendant. Proof that she wasn't the empty thing her marriage had carved out of her. Proof that someone could still look at her and see something worth consuming.

In this moment, the guilt should have followed, swift and cutting, deteriorating the moment and the way Cillian was holding her. Instead, she felt only a predatory satisfaction, fierce and unapologetic.

Let her drink from his adoration. Let her rebuild herself on the foundation of his need. She would take what he offered and let it sustain her through whatever wreckage awaited.

But beneath that newfound armor, tonight had reminded her of something else inside her. It moved through her bloodstream. Ever patient, persistent, and impossible to purge. It had been there all along, of course, threading itself through every choice, every breath, every desperate attempt at reinvention. No matter how far she ran or how many hands reached for her, it remained, immutable as gravity.

The knowledge that she would never love another man.

Not the way she loved Cillian. Not with that bone-deep recognition, that universal certainty. She knew it the way she knew her own heartbeat — involuntary, essential, carved into the very architecture of who she was. This conversation with him had stripped away every defense she'd built, leaving that truth exposed, mangled and bleeding.

It was the way he'd remembered her presentation. He had known without being told that Catherine was the center of every fear. The way his voice spoke her name like he was reciting his last words. How he'd reached across months of silence and found exactly the words she needed to hear.

Underneath all their fractures and failures, he still had memorized her inner landscape. Still knew the exact shape of her damage, the precise pressure points of her joy. Conner saw her surface — beautiful, available, hungry for validation. But Cillian saw the blueprint, knew which walls were load-bearing and which ones she'd built just to have something to tear down.

The realization didn't comfort her. If anything, it made Conner's touch feel more necessary, more urgent. She would drown herself in his wanting because the alternative, the vast, echoing truth of what she'd lost — was too much to bear in the harsh light of sobriety.