Chapter 145 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 28

Chapter 145 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 28
COLE

Callum almost never calls.
That's just a fact about my brother. He texts in fragments, sometimes a single word with no context, sometimes a voice note he forgets to label so you open it expecting something important and it's thirty seconds of him eating crisps and humming to himself. Calling is not his thing. So when his name came up on my screen as an actual phone call on a Wednesday evening I answered so fast I nearly knocked my laptop off the desk.
"Lennox is pregnant."
I sat down. Not near a chair, just straight down onto the kitchen floor, back against the cabinet, because my legs made a unilateral decision to stop working.
"How far along."
"Six weeks. We've been sitting on it. You know what she's like, she wanted to be sure before she started telling people, and then once we were sure she wanted to tell people in the right order and apparently I'm third." He laughed, that open surprised laugh he does when something has genuinely gotten past his usual composure. "Behind her mum and Petra from her book club, just so you know where we stand."
"You're third behind Petra from book club?"
"Petra knew before me. Lennox needed someone to talk to who wasn't going to cry immediately."
"Did you cry?"
"Absolutely not." A pause. "I had to go into the bathroom and run the tap so she couldn't hear me."
I laughed so hard I banged the back of my head against the cabinet and didn't care even a little bit. Callum was laughing too, the easy full version he doesn't do in public, and for a couple of minutes we were just two brothers on the phone being completely ridiculous about the best possible news. It was so good, honestly, it was so fucking good to feel like that for a minute, to feel something that wasn't guilt or regret or the slow grind of waiting for a woman I'd hurt to decide if she was done with me.
"A girl," he said, when we'd settled down.
"A girl."
"She's going to have Lennox's face. I've already accepted this."
"She's going to be terrifying."
"She's going to eat people for breakfast and apologize to nobody about it, yes." He sounded so happy. "Mum's already lost her mind. She's been on the phone to every person she's ever met."
"She called me last week actually."
"About... the baby?"
"About something else. But she'll call about the baby eleven more times before the week's out."
"Oh, definitely." He was quiet for a second, comfortable quiet, the kind we've been doing since we were kids sharing a room and had run out of things to say but weren't ready to stop talking. "She mentioned something."
"Yeah, I figured."
"I'm not going to ask you about it."
"Okay."
"I'm just saying I'm not going to ask. If you want to talk about it you can, and if you don't then we can spend the next twenty minutes arguing about whether Lennox is going to win the baby name situation, because she's already proposed four names and vetoed twelve of mine including ones I hadn't technically suggested yet."
"How do you veto a name someone hasn't suggested."
"She said, and I'm quoting, 'I know the kind of names you'd pick and none of them are happening.' Which is actually impressive when you think about it."
"It really is." I was smiling. I'd forgotten I could do that without it feeling like I was performing it. "Fine. Yes. There's a woman. I made a mistake and she asked for some space and I'm sitting here trying to figure out what to do with myself in the meantime."
"Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"What do you want me to say. You clearly don't need me to tell you what you did wrong, you've already done that yourself, I can hear it." He shifted, the soft sound of him settling somewhere comfortable. "What kind of mistake?"
"The kind where I meant well and it still landed badly."
"Those are the worst ones."
"Yeah.”
"And she matters."
It wasn't a question. I didn't answer it like one. "Yeah, she does."
"Then stop trying to manage it and just tell her that." He said it easily, no fanfare, like it was obvious, which from the outside probably it was. "Not the explanation. Not the reasoning or the justification. Not the whole careful argument you've been building in your head about why you did what you did. Just that she matters. People need to hear it, Cole. Even the ones who seem like they don't."
"Especially those ones, I think."
"Especially those ones." He paused. "Lennox didn't believe me the first few times I told her I was serious about her. She thought I was going to get bored and leave. It took a while. It took showing up in ways she didn't expect, not big dramatic gestures, just consistency. Also, of course you fucked up, you’re… you"
I couldn’t help but snicker. "That's not very funny"
"Sorry, would you prefer I tell you to grovel."
"Little bit, yeah."
"Grovel then. Obviously grovel. Buy flowers. Write something down. Show up."
"I can't show up right now, she asked for space."
"There are ways to show up that aren't physically standing on someone's doorstep. You know that." He paused again. "You've always been better at the big things than the small ones. The big gestures, the big solutions, the grand plans. She doesn't need you to fix something. She needs to know you see her."
I didn't have a response to that ready. Partly because he was right and partly because he'd said it so plainly.
"When did you get so wise, brother" I said.
"I've always been wise. You've just been too busy being the one with the opinions to notice."
"You're going to be insufferable as a father."
"Completely insufferable," he agreed, delighted.
We talked for another half hour. About the name situation, which was apparently genuinely contentious and might require mediation. About the nursery he'd started painting even though Lennox had told him to wait because they didn't know the gender when he initially started and Callum had apparently said "the baby won't care what color the walls are, it's a baby" and then painted them anyway.
By the time we hung up it was past ten. I sat there on my kitchen floor for another minute before I got up, because the floor had started to feel weirdly comfy, and I wasn't quite ready to go back to being a person with a to-do list and a calendar and a professional life that required me to function.
I pulled a notepad from the drawer next to the fridge. Found a pen that barely worked, shook it until it did. Sat down at the counter and stared at the blank page for probably five full minutes.
Wrote her name. Just that. Vivienne. My handwriting is terrible, always has been, and her name looked slightly crooked on the page like it was judging me for even attempting this.
Because here's the thing about deciding to write someone a letter, a real one, actual handwriting on paper, the kind of thing that has to be deliberate just by nature of how long it takes. You can't start until you know what you're actually trying to say. And I'd been so busy cataloguing what I'd done wrong, all the meetings and the emails and the closed doors she wasn't behind, that I hadn't figured out the underneath of it yet. The part that mattered more than the apology. The part Callum had said so simply that I'd nearly missed it.
She matters. Tell her she matters. Not the footnotes, not the context, just that.
I wrote: I've been sitting here trying to work out how to say this without it sounding like another explanation, because I think the last thing you need from me right now is another explanation. So I'm going to try to just say the actual thing.
Stopped. Read it back. Crossed out "actual thing" and wrote "what I mean" instead. Then crossed that out too and went back to "actual thing."
Kept going.
You are the most...
Stopped again.
The pen was running out. The ink had gone faint and scratchy halfway through "most" and I shook it and it came back for about two sentences and then started fading again. I sat there with a half-finished sentence and a dying pen and the city going quiet outside my window, and honestly that felt about right. That felt exactly right, actually. Trying to say something true with a pen that kept giving out on me.
I put the notepad under my keys so I'd see it in the morning. I didn't go to bed for a long time after that. And gods I miss Vivienne so damn much.