"A while."
I turn in his arm. Clumsy — my elbow catches the cheerful yellow bedspread, my knee bumps his thigh. Not a graceful romance-novel roll. More of a shuffling rearrangement that ends with my face close to his, his arm still around me.
His eyes are open. Gray, even in the low light. Dark henley pushed up at one forearm, the thin pale scar visible from wrist to past his elbow. The jaw that ticks when he's processing something he doesn't want to process.
It's ticking now.
"You should go back to sleep." His voice is rough. Morning-rough, except it's nowhere near morning.
"Probably." I don't close my eyes. "You should stop holding me like that if you want me to."
His hand goes still on my back. The honesty lands between us — too loud for the quiet room, too true for him to deflect with a perimeter check.
"Kari."
"That's my name."
"This is —" He stops. Starts again. "I'm supposed to be —"
"If you say 'professional,' I'm going to remind you that you told me a story about chasing a diplomat's cat through a hotel lobby."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a full smile. His version is a crack in concrete — small, reluctant, more structural damage than expression.
"Ambassador," he says. "His name was Ambassador."
"Seventeen pounds of Maine Coon with an escape plan." My voice is steady. My pulse is not. "That's what made me —"
I stop myself. Tap my thumbnail against my teeth in the dark.
"Made you what?"
The ceiling fan clicks. The house settles around us — Millicent and her wallpaper, the pipes I've talked to, the floors that creak in a pattern I've memorized. Foxglove holding its breath.
"That's what made me stop pretending this was fake," I say.
The words sit in the room like something breakable.
Liam doesn't move for a long moment. His hand is still on my back, a warm weight through my shirt. His jaw ticks once, twice. I watch him fight the thing he fights — the need to control, to catalog, to treat every feeling like a security breach that needs containing.
"It stopped being fake for me before that," he says.
My chest does the complicated thing again. "When?"
"The pipe. When you apologized to the pipe for kicking it."
A laugh escapes — startled, real. "That pipe had it coming. Gerald was being useless, the joint wouldn't seal —"
"You said 'I'm sorry, I know it's not your fault, you're doing your best.'" His voice is quiet. "To a pipe."
"It was doing its best."
"I know." His thumb traces a line along my spine. "That's when."
The laugh fades into something that aches in the place where I keep all the things I've wanted and been afraid to reach for. The apartment I rearranged around a man who left. The version of myself I made smaller, quieter, more convenient — because that's what wanting someone cost.
Liam is watching me figure this out. He doesn't rush it.
That's the thing about him. A man who fixes stuck drawers at three in the morning without telling you. Who reads paperback thrillers he hides under his pillow like they're contraband. Who laughed at a woman talking to a pipe and somehow that laugh rearranged everything.
