Page 98 of Power Play
I go quiet. That’s the bit I haven’t said out loud.
Mum doesn’t press. She just lets the silence hang.
Finally, I say, “I’m not afraid ofhim. I just don’t want to lose myself.”
“And you won’t,” she says softly. “Not with him. Not with that ridiculous voice note he sent me last month thanking me for giving birth to ‘a tiny goddess with better taste than sense.’”
I snort. “He didnot.”
“He absolutely did. And I saved it. Might play it at your wedding.”
I groan. “You’re the worst.”
“I’m the best, and you know it.”
We chat a bit longer about work, her book club; she’s trying to make them read hockey romance next, and I told her she’s banned from that genre entirely, and then we move on to what she’s planting in the garden next week.
When we hang up, I feel a little lighter. No decision has been made but I feel less tangled.
I love him.
But love doesn’t mean handing over the keys to my whole life.
It means finding a way to share it without disappearing inside his.
I sit on the sofa for a full five minutes after hanging up with Mum, phone still warm in my hand, her voice echoing in my head.
“You’re scared. Doesn’t mean you don’t love him.”
The thing is she’s right. I am scared. Not of Murphy, but of what he makes me feel. Of the way he’s nudged his way into every quiet space in my life, until the idea of him not being there feels wrong. Empty.
I pick up my phone again before I can second-guess myself.
He answers immediately. “Hey.”
That voice. Warm, familiar, a little breathless as if he might’ve sprinted for the phone. It hits me square in the chest.
“Hey,” I say, curling my legs tighter beneath me. “Got a sec?”
“For you? Always.”
I breathe out slowly. “I talked to my mum.”
A beat. “Yeah?”
“She made a lot of sense. Annoyingly.” I try for lightness, but it comes out too fragile.
There’s a pause on the other end. “Tell me what’s going on in that brilliant head of yours.”
So I do.
“I’m scared,” I say, voice wobbling despite myself. “Not of you.But of losing who I am if I move in with you. Of giving up parts of myself without realising it until I don’t recognise the girl in the mirror anymore.”
He doesn’t answer right away. I wait, heart thudding, for a joke or a brush-off. But when he speaks, his voice is low and raw.
“Soph, I would never want you to lose yourself for me.”
“I know. Logically, I know. But emotionally? I’ve spent so long making my life mine. My flat, my routine, my mismatched mugs, my mess. And you, Murph, you come in like a storm. Loud and fast and full-on. And I love that. I loveyou.But I don’t know how to keep the parts of me that are quiet and slow and mine when I’m with you all the time.”
