He was at her door in twenty minutes.
She let him in and they sat at the kitchen table — always the kitchen table, she thought, this small ordinary surface that had become the site of every significant thing between them — and she told him everything. Dr. Marsh. Garrett's update. Victoria's call.
He listened without interrupting. When she finished, he said, "She won't get the chance to use it publicly. Helena will have an injunction by morning."
"I know." She wrapped her hands around her mug. "That's not why I called you."
He looked at her.
"I called you," she said carefully, "because you heard part of it in the server records and I told you it wasn't relevant and I've been — I've been managing information between us and I'm tired of it." She looked at the mug. "It's not fair. To either of us."
"Tell me," he said.
She breathed in. She breathed out.
"When you signed the divorce papers," she said, "I was eight weeks pregnant. I didn't know yet — I found out three days later." She kept her eyes on the table. "I had every intention of telling you. I called your office four times. I was — I was terrified but I thought, whatever else is happening, this is something we handle together." She paused. "Your assistant told me you'd left instructions not to take my calls. Victoria had apparently — she'd told your team that contact from me was unwanted."
Callum's jaw worked.
"I lost the pregnancy at eleven weeks," she said. "At Mara's apartment. It was — it was quiet, and private, and awful, and I handled it the way I was handling everything that year, which was alone and without making any noise about it." She finally looked up at him. "I'm not telling you this to punish you. I need you to understand that. You couldn't have known. You were not yourself and the system around you was designed to keep me out." She held his gaze. "But you asked me once what you were missing and I've been giving you fragments and you deserve the whole picture."
The kitchen was completely silent.
Callum had gone very still in the way he went still when something was too large to move around — absolute, braced.
"Elara," he said. His voice was wrecked.
"Don't." She shook her head. "Please don't apologies. I can't — I can't hear you apologies for this right now. It'll undo me and I've worked very hard not to be undone."
He nodded. He pressed his hands flat on the table between them.
They sat in the silence together for a long time.
It was not a comfortable silence. But it was an honest one. And honest, she had learned, was worth more than comfortable.
— ✶ —
"When I try to imagine what the last two years were like for you," he said eventually, his voice low and careful, "I can't. I've tried and I can't get there. The scale of it."
"You're not supposed to be able to get there," she said. "You weren't there."
"I should have been."
"Yes." She looked at him without flinching. "You should have been."
He accepted that. He didn't argue it, didn't qualify it. Just took it the way it was meant — as fact, not accusation.
She appreciated that more than she could say.
"The sessions are helping," she said, moving them forward the way she always did. "Dr. Harmon thinks you could recover sixty to seventy percent by the end of the month."
"And the other thirty percent?"
"May come in time. May not." She looked at him. "Does that scare you?"
He considered it honestly. "Less than it did a month ago," he said. "A month ago I was trying to recover a map. Now I think I'm recovering something different."
"What?"
He looked at her. "The reason the map mattered."
She looked away first.
He left at midnight.
She was locking the door when her phone buzzed.
Nathan.
*Can we talk tomorrow? In person. Not about work.*
She looked at the message for a long time.
She knew what the conversation was going to be. She'd known it was coming for weeks — had seen it in the way Nathan looked at her when Callum's name came up, in the careful steadiness he maintained that was costing him more than he let on.
She typed back: *Yes. Morning. The coffee place on Clement Street.*
She set the phone down.
She stood in her hallway between the closed front door and the rest of her apartment and thought about two men — one she had loved completely and lost catastrophically, one who had found her at her lowest and stayed without condition.
She thought about what it meant that when Victoria had called tonight to threaten her, the person she had wanted to call was Callum.
Not Nathan.
Callum.
She turned the lights
off.
She went to bed.
She didn't sleep again.