CONNER MORRISON had been a gentleman. It was Auden who had asked him to take her to his bed.

The memory played on repeat as she sat across from Brigid in the sun-drenched breakfast nook, coffee growing cold in her hands. She could still feel the phantom pull of his eyes when she'd whispered those words in his greenhouse, surrounded by contained earthly beauty. The way his eyes had searched her face, looking for certainty in a moment that defied rational thought.

"Are you sure?" he had asked, his voice colored by restraint. And when she'd nodded, pink dusting her cheeks, he had exhaled slowly, letting her decision embed itself like roots in the dirt. There was no untangling themselves now.

The walk upstairs had been a slow procession — each step Conner gave her an opportunity to change her mind, each pause at a landing a chance to let sanity prevail. But she hadn't wanted sanity. She had wanted to feel something other than the emptiness of another man in her chest.

His bedroom was everything she'd expected from a man with more money than sense. The king-sized bed was dressed in Egyptian cotton that felt like liquid against her skin, the mattress snug inside a rich mahogany frame that probably cost more than her car. The plush carpet felt like clouds beneath her feet. But it was the way he'd looked at her standing there, bathed in that golden glow of the bedroom lamps, that had made her feel like the most expensive thing in the room.

He had been so careful with her, as if she were made of spun glass rather than flesh and bone. His fingers had trembled as they slid under the hem of her shirt, her skin feeling as if it had been caught on fire. He had been savoring every moment, every reveal of skin, giving himself every opportunity to understand how her body was shaped.

When her shirt had fallen away, he had traced the line of her collarbone with his lips, whispering against her pulse point that she was beautiful, that her body was perfect. She could still remember the intoxicating contrast of textures: the silk of his skin against hers, smooth and warm where their bodies pressed together; the slight roughness of his fingertips as they mapped the curve of her waist. His hands had been reverent yet possessive as they found the small of her back, drawing her closer until there was no space left between them, pulling her hips flush against him with a need that matched her own.

The memory lingered in her body – the weight of his touch, the way her flesh had seemed to sing wherever he caressed her, the undoing scent of him that had surrounded her like a fever dream. Even now, she could recall how time had seemed to slow, how every sensation had been magnified until the world had narrowed to just the two of them, breathing the same air, sharing the same heartbeat.

This was what she had forgotten in the intimacy of her marriage – that touch could exist without agenda, without the need to prove a point or work through anger. With Cillian, their bodies had become instruments of war, passion twisted into something sharp and painful, exhilarating in its intensity but shameful in its aftermath. But Conner had no motivation beyond the moment itself, no anger to work through, no pain to inflict. Just pure feeling — the simple desire to give pleasure rather than take it as spoils of conflict.

He had made her remember that her body was her own, that she could choose who touched it and how, that desire was not something to be rationed or weaponized but something to be celebrated. In his arms, she had felt like a woman instead of a casualty, alive instead of merely surviving.

And Auden had realized something the moment he entered her. It should have terrified her more than it did, but it didn't. Not the kiss in the greenhouse, not following him upstairs, not the way she'd arched beneath him, accepting him inside her the way Catholics accepted the body of Christ — on her tongue and in her body, as communion and redemption and the promise of becoming something new.

And if that made her selfish, if that made her reckless, if that made her everything Cillian would probably say she was — well, maybe it was time to stop caring what everyone else thought she should be.

"And then what happened?" Brigid asked, leaning forward with her mug suspended halfway between the table and her lips, eyes wide in awe and fascination.

Auden blinked, suddenly aware that she'd been speaking aloud, that she'd been confessing to more than just herself. Heat crept up her neck, and she found herself giggling — a breathless, startled sound that belonged to someone younger, someone less careful. "I left."

Brigid gawked. "You fucked him and left?"

She sipped her lukewarm coffee, the bitterness grounding her back in the present moment, in this room across from her friend's incredulous stare. "Pretty much."

But the lightness in her voice felt forced now, a performance for Brigid's benefit. Because what Auden couldn't say — what felt too raw to put into words — was how afterward, she had sat on the edge of his bed, sheets clutched to her chest, watching the digital clock on his nightstand blur from 11:47 to 11:48. Bliss had paved the way for rationality. It always had for Auden. Reality sunk its claws into her stomach. She had known it was too late to be making the drive back to Dublin, and she knew she couldn't stay. She wouldn't let herself.

The memory shifted, becoming sharper, more urgent. She could still hear Conner's voice behind her, thick with sleep and satisfaction: "Don't go. Stay." His fingers had traced lazy patterns along her spine, each touch sending aftershocks through her oversensitive skin.

She'd turned to look at him then — hair mussed against the pillow, eyes heavy-lidded and soft in the dim light, looking younger than his years and impossibly beautiful in his contentment. Part of her wanted nothing more than to sink back into those expensive sheets, to let him pull her against his chest and pretend that morning wouldn't come with its inevitable complications.

"I can't," she had said softly, though the words felt like they were being pried from some locked box in her chest. "I'm seeing my daughter in the morning."

The conversation that followed played back now with crystalline clarity — his playful protests, her laughter, the way he'd made her feel seventeen instead of thirty-six. How easy it had been to exist in that bubble of pleasure and possibility, how tempting to believe that the world beyond his bedroom didn't exist.

But it did exist. It was waiting for her now in the form of Brigid's expectant face, in the knowledge that in a few hours she would sit across from Catherine and pretend she was still the same mother she'd been yesterday, with a secret pressed against her ribs, making her breath feel forced.

"So what now?" Brigid asked, her voice gentler, as if she'd noticed the shift in Auden's demeanor.

Auden shrugged, the gesture feeling heavy. "Now I pick up my daughter and pretend I know what I'm doing."

Because that was exactly what she would have to do – perform normalcy when everything inside her felt fundamentally changed, carry on as if she hadn't just discovered that her body was still capable of feeling something other than loss.

That afternoon, Auden took Catherine to paint pottery — a safe choice, neutral territory that demanded nothing more complicated than choosing colors and staying within the lines. It was the kind of wholesome mother-daughter activity that felt like proof she was still capable of making good decisions, still deserving of the title "mother."

Inside, Catherine moved through the shelves with Auden trailing behind, watching her small fingertips trail across smooth clay surfaces until she found what she was searching for.

"This one," Catherine announced, lifting a small reindeer with careful hands. Her face lit up with the particular joy that came with Christmas proximity – the golden time when her birthday and the holidays conspired to make the month of December feel like one long celebration of her existence.

Watching her daughter's delight, Auden felt the first crack in the protective shell she'd built around the night before. Here was her real life – not stolen hours in expensive bed sheets, but this person who trusted her completely, who looked at her like she hung the moon. The guilt crept in slowly, like water finding its way through a dam.

She forced a smile, "That's perfect, sweets."

Auden selected a modest clay house, its simple lines appealing to her need for something contained, something she could control. They settled at a table by the window where late-autumn light filtered through glass, casting everything in silver and shadow.

The painting began in comfortable silence. Catherine approached her reindeer with the intense focus of a master craftsman, her tongue poking out slightly as she loaded her brush with burgundy paint. Auden found herself studying her daughter's profile in the window light — the delicate curve of her jaw, the way her lashes cast tiny crescents on her cheeks.

But it was Catherine's eyes that always undid her: Cillian's eyes, that particular shade of sky blue, framed by his distinctive shape that made them seem perpetually observant about the world. The resemblance was so strong it was almost violent. It was a constant reminder of what she'd left behind, what she was in the process of destroying.

It hit her – that ache of missing this. Missing the daily witness of Catherine's expressions, the little discoveries, the way she wrinkled her nose when concentrating. She'd grown accustomed to the luxury of her daughter's presence, the background music of her chatter, the way she moved through their home like a bright thread weaving everything together. Now these moments felt stolen, precious in their scarcity.

The memory of Conner's hands on her skin felt suddenly obscene in the presence of this innocence. What had felt like redemption in his bedroom now felt like betrayal – not of Cillian, necessarily, but of this. Of the family she was supposed to be protecting, even as she was tearing it apart.

"Kittie, how have you been feeling?" The question escaped before she could stop it, softer than intended, the type of voice Auden used with her daughter when topics were meant to be serious. It was the same tone she had used when she had explained that Auden wasn't going to be living at home anymore.

Catherine's brush paused mid-stroke. Her daughter's face shifted, brow furrowing as if she were trying to solve an equation too complex for her years. In that pause, Auden saw herself reflected back — the same uncertain tilt of the head, the same way of chewing the inside of her cheek when thinking.

"You can be honest with me," Auden pushed gently, setting down her own brush. "There's been a lot of change."

Catherine resumed painting, but her strokes became less dedicated, more distracted. The attention she'd been paying to the reindeer's antlers gave way to something more mechanical, more distant.

"I feel sad sometimes," she said quietly, not looking up from her work. "Because you're not there."

Auden's fingers pressed into the tabletop, knuckles going white against her taut skin. The guilt that had been creeping in all morning crashed over her like a tidal wave — guilt for leaving, for choosing her own survival over Catherine's daily happiness, for being the person who had ultimately ruined her daughter's perfectly pure understanding of what loving parents looked like.

But before Auden could formulate an apology or explanation, Catherine continued, matter-of-fact in the way children could be about the strangest revelations.

"Daddy's been sleeping in my room. On the floor. He says he needs a new bed, but I think he misses you too."

Auden's hands jerked to her lap, as if Catherine's words had somehow burned. The sudden movement jostled the table, Catherine's eyes widening as one of Auden's paintbrushes rolled, clattering to the floor and leaving a yellow streak across the floor. Around them, the studio carried on — a toddler laughed somewhere behind them, a mother praised her son's color choices — but these sounds felt suddenly distant, muffled by the rushing in her ears.

Cillian. On Catherine's bedroom floor. She could picture it so clearly – all of him curled up on some makeshift bed, listening for their daughter's breathing in the dark, both of them trying to find comfort in each other's presence while nursing the wound she had created.

While she had been tugged by the merits of lingering in Conner's arms, while she had been discovering that her body was still capable of ecstasy, her husband had been sleeping on their daughter's floor, too broken to face their empty bed.

She coughed awkwardly as Catherine resumed painting, her daughter's concern quickly wiped by the half-painted reindeer that still needed to be given eyes. Auden shifted, chair legs scraping as she twisted to pick up the brush.

When Auden straightened, she was met with a hopeful look from Catherine, a paint smudge now decorating her cheek. "Maybe Santa will buy him a new bed for Christmas."

Auden blinked, eyes flicking down at the clay house sitting in front of her – its walls half-painted, its windows still waiting for color. Such a simple thing, really, this idea of shelter. Of making a space safe enough to rest in.

This little ceramic house with its walls and windows — it was supposed to represent shelter, safety, the promise of warmth inside. But all Auden could see now was how it had become a container for pain, how she'd left Catherine and Cillian trapped inside the four walls of their broken life with only each other to cling to in the wreckage. She had turned their home into a prison, their love into a burden they carried alone while she sought freedom in something else. Someone else.

"Maybe," she managed, the word barely more than a breath. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears — foreign, empty. She dipped her brush into paint and began filling in the windows, each one a light against the gathering dark outside, each one a lie about the safety that could be found in houses built on broken foundations.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Emma didn't answer the door.

Standing on the front step with Catherine in her hand, Auden felt the twist of anxiety in her stomach intensify. She knocked again, the sound echoing hollow against the wood, and tried to ignore the voice in her head that whispered she deserved this discomfort and deserved to stand here wondering if her own mother was avoiding her.

It was Cillian who greeted her.

He stood in the doorway like a question she wasn't ready to answer, his graying hair disheveled as if he'd just woken up despite the time of day. Unlike their therapy session, she could see more. His white shirt and sweats hung loose on his frame. His sharp jaw was obscured by facial hair, as if he hadn't shaved since their first therapy session a few days prior. He was entirely removed from the man she was used to seeing.

Cillian studied Auden's face with passive interest, a single brow raised in silent questioning.

"Where's Emma?" Auden asked, brittle with her own discomfort.

Cillian shrugged, a gesture so casual it felt like a slap. "Dunno. Her and Aiden left a few hours ago."

"We went painting," Catherine chimed in happily, grinning up at her father. "And then we got hot chocolate with whipped cream."

For just a moment, something shifted in Cillian's face. His features softened, the hard lines around his eyes melting away as he looked down at their daughter. A ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, and for that brief instant, Auden was reminded that Catherine was the most important thing in the world to him, no matter the circumstances.

But then his gaze flicked back to Auden, and the moment shattered. The walls went back up, his expression closing off like shutters slamming shut. He cleared his throat and stepped back from the door.

"Come on inside before you freeze, Kittie," he said, his voice coaxing with Catherine even as his eyes remained cold when they met Auden's. "It's getting dark out there."

He turned and walked away, leaving the door open behind him. It was not quite an invitation, but felt more like indifference. Catherine ran after him, her voice bright and animated as she launched into a detailed account of every color she'd used on her reindeer, every marshmallow that had floated in her hot chocolate.

Auden stood frozen on the front step, watching them retreat into the warm glow of the hallway. The November air bit at her cheeks, unforgiving, but she barely felt it. All she could see was the two of them disappearing back into that house – the prison she had created with her absence, the place where they had learned to exist without her.

It felt like staring through a window into her own childhood – the same choreography she and her father had perfected after her mother disappeared into her own needs, her own pain, her own version of self-preservation. She could see it now with devastating clarity: how Catherine's bright chatter filled the spaces where adult conversation should have been, how Cillian's gentle responses held both mother and father, how they had learned to be enough for each other because they were forced to be.

Auden had become her mother.

Part of her wanted to turn around, to climb back into her car and return to Brigid's apartment where she didn't have to confront what she'd done. But a larger part – the part that ached with guilt and longing and the terrible understanding of who she'd let herself turn into – pulled her forward.

Maybe it was because she missed this. Maybe it was because seeing them together made her realize how much she wanted to be part of it again. Or maybe it was simply that standing out here in the cold felt like exactly what she deserved, and the only way to stop punishing herself was to step inside.

The moment she crossed the foyer, warmth enveloped her. She hadn't stepped foot in here since she had left, yet the house welcomed Auden with its familiar scents – tea and Catherine's lavender shampoo, the lingering smell of whatever Cillian had cooked for dinner. It felt like coming home and trespassing all at once.

Out of habit, Auden removed her shoes and tiptoed down the hallway. Unlike the Morrison estate, this house, with its worn hardwood floors and mismatched furniture, its photographs of Catherine's first steps still hanging on the walls, felt more real than anything she'd experienced in the past twenty-four hours.

She found Cillian in the living room, standing before the bookshelf that lined the far wall. The books rose in perfect ascending order from left to right. Catherine had already disappeared upstairs to her bedroom, and in her absence, the distance between Auden and Cillian quieter, more dangerous, as if without her daughter's presence as a buffer, there was nothing left to protect themselves.

"I see you kept Aiden's organization," she paused at threshold, attempting something light, something that might bridge the chasm between them.

The sound of her voice caused him to startle, his whole body jerking as if she'd struck him. When he turned to face her, his eyes were wide, surprise bleeding quickly into something harder, more defensive. The reaction was so visceral, so immediate, that it made her wonder how long it had been since anyone had spoken to him in a tone that wasn't hesitation.

But Cillian said nothing. He simply turned back to the shelf, his shoulders tense, his silence deafening. Auden wracked her brain for some sort of excuse, some sort of explanation as to why she let herself wander in her in the first place.

"We should probably talk about Catherine's birthday party," she settled on and instantly hating how formal it sounded.

Cillian's shoulders tensed further. He didn't turn around, didn't acknowledge her presence beyond the slight stiffening of his back. His fingers traced along the spine of a book she couldn't see — Neruda, maybe, or Max Porter.

Her foot moved forward, crossing into the living room. Dangerous territory, she knew, but couldn't help herself.

"Cill?"

The sound of his nickname seemed to break whatever spell had held him frozen. This time, he glanced back over his shoulder, and for a moment, they simply stared at each other.

"Catherine's birthday," Auden said again, her voice softer now. "We should probably talk about what we want to do for her party."

The sound that escaped him wasn't quite a cough, wasn't quite a laughter. He turned back to the bookshelf, pulling a volume free with more force than necessary, clutching it against his chest like armor.

"Should we?" he asked bitterly.

Auden took a step closer, and he moved away instinctively, maintaining the distance between them like it was something sacred, something necessary for survival. When he finally turned to face her fully, she could see the book in his hands — something thick and worn, poetry most likely, the kind of thing he'd always turned to when the world felt too harsh.

Auden sighed softly, "Well, her birthday is in a month, so probably."

"Is there a third party present?" he questioned, sarcasm dripping from his words.

The question hit its mark, calling back to their last therapy session, to her own walls and conditions. The irony wasn't lost on her — how she'd insisted on neutral territory for their conversations while simultaneously creating the most compromised ground possible in another man's bedroom.

But she couldn't give him the satisfaction of not answering. "No."

"Then I don't want to talk to you." Cillian raised an eyebrow as he said this, his features lifting in a way that might have been triumphant if it hadn't looked so tired. Using her own words against her, turning her boundaries into weapons.

The frustration rose in Auden, hot and immediate. Every rational part of her screamed to leave, to walk away before this could get worse, before they could find new ways to hurt each other. But something else held her there — guilt, stubbornness, the growing awareness that she'd been running from this conversation in increasingly destructive ways.

This was the man who'd been sleeping on their daughter's floor, who'd been carrying the weight of their broken family alone while she discovered pleasure in another man's arms.

Fine, she thought to herself. Have it your way.

Auden moved to the couch and sat down, sinking into the cushions that still held the indentation of her body.

"What are you doing?" His voice pitched higher, something almost panicked threading through it.

She shrugged, making herself comfortable. "Sitting."

"Auden," he practically groaned.

"I'm not leaving." She settled back into the cushions, folding her hands in her lap with forced calm. "Not until we talk."

Cillian stood frozen for a long moment, the book still pressed against his chest. She could see the war playing out in his mind – the part of him that wanted to storm out, the part that wanted to fight, and underneath it all, the part that was just tired. So impossibly tired.

"You are something else," he mumbled through a long sigh, finally moving to the armchair across from her. The same chair she had sat in so many weeks ago, awaiting patiently for his arrival so she could announce that she was leaving him.

Cillian didn't sit so much as collapse, his legs sprawling out in front of him, his body sinking deep into the chair. The book hit the carpet with a dull thud, discarded entirely. In the lamplight, she could see the full extent of his exhaustion – the heavy, dark circles under his eyes, the way his cheekbones had been hollowed out, the dryness of his bottom lip which had been split open and hardly healed.

"When's the last time you had a full night's sleep?" Auden prompted. "You look kind of rough."

He gazed at her through half-lidded eyes, his dark lashes casting shadows across his cheekbones. "Did you just come over to piss me off? Because if so, you're succeeding."

The words should have stung, should have made her defensive. Instead, they made something in her chest soften. She could hear it now — not just irritation, but something rawer, more vulnerable. The sound of someone who had been hurt so many times he'd forgotten how to expect anything else.

"Of course not." She propped her elbow onto the arm of the couch, letting her head rest in her palm. Her hair fell over the back of her neck, and she was suddenly, acutely aware of how Conner had tangled his fingers in these same strands hours ago. The memory felt obscene now, sitting in this room full of family photographs and shared history.

"Catherine mentioned something to me today. I wanted to know if it was true."

Cillian pursed his lips, "I thought this was about her birthday."

Auden brought her bottom lip between her teeth. "We can talk about that too. I just...There's something else."

Cillian responded with a raise of his eyebrows, giving her permission to continue, and she felt her courage falter. Because now she would have to acknowledge that she knew about his sleeping arrangements, that she understood the full extent of what her leaving had cost – not just him, but their daughter.

"She, uh," Auden felt herself flush, her eyes glancing away from his face toward a photo on the side table – the four of them at the beach two summers ago, Catherine's gap-toothed grin between their sun-kissed faces, with Charlie hovering above her head. They looked happy in that photo. They looked whole.

Her eyes fell back to her husband. "She said something about how you sleep in her room now. On her floor."

The words hung in the air between them, almost accusatory in nature. Cillian's posture shifted immediately – his sprawled legs pulled in slightly, his spine straightening as if she'd touched something tender. The casual mask he'd been wearing slipped just enough for her to see the vulnerability beneath, and it was devastating.

He was quiet for a long moment, his fingers picking at a loose thread on the chair's armrest. When he finally spoke, he sounded defeated.

"She hasn't been sleeping through the night since you left."

Auden her throat tightened against the savage surge of maternal remorse that rose up in her chest. Her daughter — her sweet, trusting daughter — had been lying awake at night, probably wondering when she was coming home, probably blaming herself somehow for the inexplicable absence of half her world.

"I didn't know," she murmured, and the words felt pathetically inadequate.

"Yeah, well," Cillian's tongue clicked on the consonant, a bitter punctuation. "It's not like I could sleep in our bed anyway." His voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "So I just started sleeping on an air mattress in her room."

Her hand moved to her throat almost involuntarily, fingers pressing against the rivet there as if she could somehow ease the ache that was forming. Conner's mouth had pressed against that same spot, but now it felt like nothing more than a hot brand of her own shame.

She watched as Cillian's shoulders sank farther into the seat, making him appear smaller, more fragile than she'd ever seen him. He was a man stripped bare, a man who had been holding their family together with his bare hands while she figured out how to feel human again.

"Are..." Auden's voice caught, and she cleared her throat. "Are you going to come to our next therapy session?"

Cillian shrugged. "I don't know. It didn't really make me feel any better, and I don't feel like wasting my money."

"I thought it was helpful."

His laughter was sharp. He looked at her directly then, and there was something dangerous in his eyes — not anger, but indignation. "Of course you did. You got to catalog everything I've ever done wrong."

"C'mon."

"What?" He lifted his head off the back of the cushion, his hair falling heavily across his forehead. "You get to sit there with your list of grievances while I try to explain why I couldn't be whatever it was you needed me to be."

The accusation stung because it wasn't entirely wrong. She had gone into therapy with a catalog of disappointments, an inventory of all the ways their marriage had failed to meet her needs. But sitting here now, seeing the full cost of her choices reflected in his exhausted face, in Catherine's sleepless nights, her grievances felt suddenly selfish.

"You can do that too, you know." Auden lifted her own head off her palm, her wrist aching from the weight. "I felt like you spent the entire time trying to defend our marriage to her."

The hard lines around his eyes softened. His tongue ghosted over his bottom lip before he said, "Maybe. It's hard not to want to."

"I don't need you to," she murmured. "Especially not in there. I just want you to be honest with how you're feeling towards me."

Cillian exhaled, his hands coming to rest across his abdomen. He folded his fingers together as if he were cradling himself somehow, protecting something soft and vital from further damage.

"Well, were you being totally honest?" he asked.

"Yes, as much as I could be." But the admission felt fake even as she spoke it, because how could she claim honesty when she was carrying the secret of another man's touch like a confession she'd never make? "You?"

He shook his head once. "No, not entirely."

She kept her eyes on him as she asked the question that had been burning in her mind since their last session. "When you said you felt nothing towards me, were you being truthful then?"

The question left her lips stripped of all the armor she usually wore when talking to him. Auden watched as he studied her, his eyes moving across her face as if he were trying to memorize the way she looked just now.

Her own gaze drifted to his mouth – the soft pink of his lips, how they looked fuller somehow in the lamplight, the way his bottom lip caught slightly when he was thinking. She had kissed those lips a thousand times, knew exactly how they felt against hers, how they moved when he whispered her name in the dark. The memory of their texture, their warmth, felt suddenly more real than anything that had happened in Conner's bedroom.

The memory of Conner's mouth burned against her conscience, a secret that tasted like betrayal and desperation in equal measure.

Cillian answered suddenly, "What do you expect me to say? Did you forget that you admitted to not loving me anymore?"

Auden blinked, eyes sliding back to his face as her mind called back to that night, when she'd let the truth of her own uncertainty slip free. She opened her mouth to respond, but found no words that could bridge the gap between what she'd said then and what she was beginning to understand now.

Instead, she shook her head.

"You left me, Aud." His voice was barely above a whisper now, "And, for the first time, I had to sit and listen to all of these feelings and doubts that you have been holding onto about what we built together. It killed me." He paused briefly. "I'm trying to manage the reality of that the best I can."

Auden felt a crack inside her chest, a fissure that threatened to split her open entirely. Because she understood, finally, how her honesty had been a leech that bled him dry and left nothing but an empty shell behind.

"So yeah," he murmured, voice brittle, "there are going to be moments when I look at you and feel nothing – or pretend to, at least – because that's easier than looking at you and feeling like I'm watching the best thing that's ever happened to me walk away."

He laughed, once, the sound broken, before shaking his head like he could shake the truth loose from his chest. His eyes burned. "The truth is, Aud, loving you while you're slipping through my fingers feels like I am being gutted from the inside out. I am coming apart vein by vein, in slow motion, while I force a smile on my face because there is nothing I can do to stop the bleeding."

Auden shattered then – each sentence landing against the glass in her chest that was so soft and unprotected. She could see Cillian in front of her with total clarity. He was the man she had fallen in love with all those years ago, the one who used to write her love letters on napkins and leave them in her coat pockets when they first got married. The one who had fought demons for her, metaphorical and otherwise, who had made her believe that love could be both safe and wild at the same time.

Fuck, of course she still loved him. The realization felt like coming up for air after nearly drowning. She loved him, and she wanted him, but only now, only because he was being real with her, only because for this moment the walls had come down and she could see the man who lived behind them.

And for just a split second, she felt every facet of her betrayal. Not just the leaving – that had been necessary, maybe even inevitable. But Conner, too. The choice to seek comfort in another man's arms while this man – the one she had vowed to have and to hold through everything – slept on their daughter's floor.

The regret was infuriating in its own right, because after all the pain Cillian had caused her, his unwillingness to change, to fight for them, had driven her into Conner's arms in the first place. But now she could see the other side of it. She could see how her leaving had been its own kind of destruction, how her quest for healing had become another kind of wound.

Part of her wanted to scream at him: Why don't you do something? Why won't you fight harder for me? Why won't you show me that you're willing to fix this mess, before I let myself lose you forever? But the questions died unspoken, hanging in the air between them like accusations that had no answers. Auden could taste it – the metallic flavor of disappointment and anger and love all twisted together into something she couldn't swallow and couldn't spit out.

And still, Cillian stared at her with that devastating expression, waiting for something she couldn't give him. Some response that would make sense of this moment, some acknowledgment of what he'd just laid bare. And Auden had nothing to offer except for the fact that she had slept with another man and the knowledge that he had driven her to do so yet again.

So, she gave him nothing — no comment, no reaction — simply gathered her composure around her like a cloak, standing up slowly to leave the room.

"Auden." His voice followed her, heightened with desperation.

She paused at the foot of the room but didn't turn around. Couldn't turn around. Because if she looked at him now, if she saw the hope or hurt or love in his face, she might crumble entirely. She pressed her lips together, waiting for him to say more because she could not help herself.

There was the soft sound of him rising from the chair, his footsteps behind her as he crossed the room. Auden held her breath as Cillian approached, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from his body against her spine.

His hand found her waist, fingers settling against the curve there with a touch so gentle that it felt almost unknown coming from him. Instantly, Auden felt a thrum of electricity so familiar and devastating in its tenderness. She felt herself turn almost involuntarily, drawn by muscle memory and instinct that lived in her bones.

When Auen faced him, his eyes were exactly as she'd feared – wounded and full of a love that had somehow remained after everything they'd put it through. Without speaking, he reached for her hand, his fingers intertwining with hers in a gesture so natural it felt like breathing.

Auden felt herself look down at their joined hands, unable to meet his gaze. His knuckles were rough from the oncoming cold, his skin slightly moist. Her hand looked impossibly small nestled in his palm. These hands had built a crib and changed Catherine's diapers. They had held Auden during panic attacks and learned to cradle her while she slept regardless of what transpired between them.

These hands had never touched another woman the way hers had welcomed another man.

"I miss you," she found herself whispering. They tore painfully from her throat. "Every morning when I wake up and you're not there. Every night when I go to bed alone. Every time I look at Kittie and see you looking back at me." Her voice cracked, but she forced herself to continue. "But I miss the way you used to look at me like I was your whole world. I miss feeling like you knew I was worth fighting for, more than anything else."

She finally looked up at him then. "I can't keep missing you and hating you at the same time, Cill. It's killing me too. And I can't keep pretending that leaving once was enough to fix what has broken between us. Because it's not."

His grip on her hand tightened, and she saw something shift in his expression – surprise, maybe, or the first flicker of something that looked like hope.

"You need to come to therapy with me," she begged softly. "Please."

She squeezed his hand once, memorizing the feel of his skin against hers, then pulled away. This time, when she walked toward the front door, he didn't follow. But she could feel his eyes on her as she stepped outside, feeling just as they'd done the last time she'd left him.