Page 126 of Our Radiant Embers

LIAM

When I woke up, Adam was gone.

All that remained was an imprint of his head on the pillow. For a few precious seconds, sleep still hazy around the corners of my mind, I tricked myself. Oh, he wasn’t gone. He’d just risen early, was probably waiting for me in the backyard with a cup of coffee. But last night, the way he’d shut down after the encounter with the Ashtons, how tightly he’d held onto me later, crescent marks of his nails still on my shoulders—no, no. It didn’t mean—no.

Then I spotted the note on my bedside table. It was held down by my phone, immediately visible when he would have normally hidden it for me to stumble upon later. I stared at it, sleep slipping away. Slowly, I reached out to pick it up.

‘You were the best thing.’

My mind went silent, in a shock freeze as I stared at words that didn’t make sense.

‘You were the best thing.’

Past tense.

Everything rushed in at once—like the tide, like my dreams of magic crushing towering buildings in an irresistible wave that left nothing untouched. The mattress rolled under me, the walls swaying, my stomach in my throat and my heart in a raw, bloody pile on the floor.

I’d known it would end this way.

I just hadn’t expected it so fucking soon. I’d thought we had time.

Sunlight and cool morning air slanted through curtains we hadn’t closed properly last night. The world kept turning, it was only me in my little corner that had been thrown into a nauseating somersault where up was down and down was up.

Stop. Breathe. Even that was Adam—his voice in my head, his taste in my mouth, his scent in my bed.

No. I wasn’t ready to let him go.

I chose his name from my recent contacts. It rang, then went to voicemail. I tried again, several rings, no answer. So he hadn’t turned it off, just chose to ignore my calls. My fingers trembled when I typed out a message instead.

‘Are you fucking serious?’

He replied immediately, must have been waiting for my message. ‘I’m sorry.’

I almost laughed, only the sound got stuck in my throat and made me dizzy instead. ‘I thought you’d have the fucking decency to say goodbye. You owe me that much.’

‘I couldn’t,’ he wrote back.

Fuck him.

‘No,’ I corrected. ‘You wouldn’t.’

He didn’t reply.

‘You realise we work together, right?’ It felt desperate, and I wanted to take the words back as soon as I’d sent them. A drowning man, grappling for glimpses of him.

‘Gale will take over. He’ll be your contact going forward.’ No discernible emotion to the barren statement, everything in order, a clean cut. My clothes were still at Adam’s place, though, my toothbrush in his bathroom, my paper-thin heart in his hands.

‘Fuck you.’ I blinked, letters swimming in front of my eyes as I typed them. I sent it and locked my phone, tossed it out of sight because what I really wanted to write was, ‘Please, Adam. Please don’t. I’m so in love with you.’

Instead, I lay down in a bed that smelled like him, closed my eyes, and willed myself to keep breathing.

* * *

“I will hunt him down.” Laurie’s voice was grit and steel. “And when I find him, I will rip him a new one.”

“Language,” Mum reprimanded. It didn’t sound like her heart was truly in it.

“Laurie’s right, though,” Jack said. Usually, him saying as much would have prompted a theatrical display of heart attacks by various family members. Not today. Spread out around the backyard table, a thermos jug with coffee and a pan with scrambled eggs in our middle, no one even batted an eye. I ducked my head over my coffee and took a sip.

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