Page 101 of Dissonance

My apartment has never felt this size before.

“Okay,” I whisper, pressing my lips together, eyes falling shut.

Maybe he was never here for me at all.

Maybe I just thought he was.

Chapter Forty

Lockie

I haven’t turned the lights on. Just sitting in the dark, jacket still on, the quiet of my apartment pressing in from every side. Thea’s across the hall—forty feet, maybe less—and I walked away from her anyway. I know what she’ll be doing, lying there, replaying it, turning the silence I gave her into evidence of something it’s not.

She’s not wrong to. But I can’t go back in there tonight and give her half of something when half is all I have.

My phone’s gripped tight in my hands, and it has been since I came home, my therapist’s number already pulled up and waiting.

“Lockie?” Joanne’s voice is calm, level, like it’s the middle of the afternoon and not whatever hour this is. “Tell me what happened.”

I’ve called her outside of our scheduled sessions just once before, six years ago, and even then, it had taken me two days to pick up the phone. Tonight, it’s taken me a few hours. That’s either progress or proof of how far gone I am. I’m not sure which.

“There was a scare,” I say, the words tearing from my throat. “With the pregnancy. False labor, they said.”

Joanne’s silent, the kind she uses when she wants the words to keep coming without having to pull them out herself. We’ve been doing this long enough—these last few months online rather than in person—but I still know what each of her silences means. I look at my hands in the shadows, at the tremor that still moves through them.

“Everything’s fine,” I say, more to myself than to her.

She makes a humming sound. “And how are you?”

I stare at the dark reflection in the balcony door, at the vague shape of me warped in the glass.

“She’s fine,” I say again, jaw tightening. “The baby’s fine. The nurse said it was completely normal for this stage.”

“I heard you,” she says. “But that’s not what I asked.”

Dragging a hand over my jaw, my beard catches. Again, it needs a trim, has for weeks. I don’t know why I’m thinking about that right now.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I stood in that room, watching the monitor, and I felt—” My throat closes around whatever was going to come next. The words are there, but saying them out loud, acknowledging it was real, has a specific fear trying to claw its way back inside.

“What did you feel?” Joanne asks when the silence has stretched too long.

I press my thumb into my palm, hard, like the pressure might help organize the shit in my head.

“Nothing.” The word comes out flat, hollow, distant. “Not relief, not…anything. Just nothing.”

The words sit between us, the quiet of my apartment pressing further in.

“What were you actually afraid of?” she asks. “In that room. Before the nurse spoke?”

I think about dodging it. Saying I don’t know, that I was tired, wound up, it was a shock, any number of things that would let me keep this sealed where it’s been for years, boxed off, opened only twice a year on Calum’s birthday and the anniversary, and even then, only barely.

But tonight, I haven’t got the fight for that.

I can’t say his name though.

“I thought…” My voice comes out rough, and I clear my throat. “I thought that was it. The moment I lost them. Thea. The baby.”

The truth lands brutal and ugly, dragging out a worry I’ve carried since the moment I found out she was carrying my child. A tightness cinches around my chest, sharp enough to bite, my lungs struggling for air. I suck in a breath and hold it, the pressure building behind my ribs until it drowns everything else out.