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No one speaks, and I feel as if my life is hanging by a thread that could snap at any moment, but then Owen says, “You’ve told me. Job done. You can leave now.” There’s no mistaking the cold callousness of his words.

“I didn’t just come here to tell you this. I came here to ask you if we could try again.”

I swallow the gigantic lump in my throat, but it won’t budge because all I can think of is how Owen has spoken of Pippa without malice, without scorn, without any hatred at all. He said he admired her honesty, that he never held anything against her. So what’s to stop him from running back into her arms?

He must have loved her. He said he loved her. She was his wife. The woman he agreed to spend the rest of his life with. And when she left him, it broke him, cast him under this grey cloud that he’s been walking under ever since.

Is this what he’s been waiting for? Has the sun finally come out for him?

“Why do you think I would want that?” Owen says as I hold back my tears.

“Because we loved each other… love each other, and that doesn’t go away. You don’t stop loving someone, and I never stopped loving you, Owen.”

I want to scream that she didn’t love him enough three years ago to stay and support him through something that must have been so difficult for him, for them both. That she can’t have loved him at all because you don’t walk out on someone you love. You just don’t.

“Nothing’s changed, Pippa. I still can’t give you what you want.”

There’s a heavy pause before Pippa speaks.

“After I left, I tried to move on. It took a while, but after the first year, I met a guy. His name was Kyle. He was nice, and I thought I could love him the way I loved you. We were together for a year, and then I got pregnant. We had a baby five months ago. And I thought it was what I wanted. I thought my dream had come true, but while I held my son, all I could think about was you and how it should’ve been your child. And that’s when I knew I had to come and find you because we could be a family, just like I always knew we could.”

Bile now coats the lump in my throat.

What is wrong with this woman?

“You never cease to amaze me,” Owen says.

There’s a heart-stopping second where I think he’s going to agree to this madness, to walk back into her arms and tell her he still loves her.

“You were always so headstrong, always out for what you wanted, and it didn’t matter who got caught in the crossfire or who you had to hurt in the process. Does Kyle know you just wanted a baby out of him?”

“It wasn’t like that. I swear,” she pleads.

“Maybe not in your head, Pippa, but it certainly looks that way.”

“I don’t love him. I love you. I’ve always loved you. This can work. It will work. I know it will, because you still love me.”

I hold my breath, waiting, hoping, praying, shaking, petrified of the next words that Owen will say until he says them.

“I don’t love you, Pippa. I did. Once. But not now.”

“How can you say that?”

I imagine her recoiling at this.

“Because I’m in love with someone else, someone who is more than you’ll ever be, someone who makes me laugh, fills the silences, illuminates the greyness, like the sun shines just for us, like she was put on this earth for me to love her and her alone.”

My grip tightens on the door because I think I’m going to collapse. There’s a second where I’m not sure who this wonderful woman is, who this amazing love interest is, until I breathe.

In. Out.

Me.

He’s talking about me.

He must be.

“You can’t love her like you love me, Owen,” Pippa snaps.