Page 114 of Dissonance

I exhale slowly. Not because the question hurts; it does, and it probably always will, but because, apart from Joanne, nobody has asked me that in a long time. Most people ask what happened, not who he was before.

“Loud,” I say, a fondness creeping into the word. “He couldn’t sit still for five minutes. I moved in with them when I was fourteen—this strange brother he barely knew with an accent—and he sort of latched on and never let go.”

“That’s sweet,” she says, and I can feel her smile against my skin.

“He had this laugh…” I continue. “You could hear it all the way through the house, drove his mum insane.” The memory of her voice yelling from her office surfaces, telling us to keep it down while I beat him senseless at whatever game he was obsessed with that week. It comes without that stabbing guilt sneaking in behind it, which doesn’t usually happen. “He was a good kid. Was going to be a good man.”

Her arms tighten around me, soft lips laying kisses over my heart.

“I keep thinking of names,” she says.

“Aye?”

“I keep going back and forth on a few, but nothing’s felt right.” Her fingers resume their slow movement. “But I was thinking, and tell me if you don’t want to, but…” She pauses. “Callie. So she’d have something of him. If you wanted.”

The name lands somewhere I wasn’t expecting, somewhere that’s been closed off for so long, and for a second, I just have to let it sit there.

“Thea.”

“You don’t have to,” she adds quickly. “It was just a thought. We don’t—”

She stops. The kick lands against my hip, firm and impossible to miss. Thea jerks, her hand going to her bump, mine alongside it, and we wait. It comes again, stronger this time.

“Callie,” I say quietly, testing the shape of it. My eyes burn, my throat thickening around everything that word carries, love and grief arriving together, my brother and my daughter in the same breath, in the same name, and I don’t have a single word that’s big enough for that.

“Aye.”

“Yeah?” Thea asks, looking up at me.

She kicks again, and I laugh, stroking along the smooth skin. “I think she likes it.”

Thea smiles, her head dropping back to my shoulder, her fingers lacing through mine where they rest on her stomach, feeling the occasional small movement beneath our palms.

“Hi, Callie,” she whispers, so quietly it’s almost a breath. “We cannot wait to meet you, baby girl.”

Chapter Forty-Six

Thea

Confetti sticks to everything. My hair, my dress, the lipstick I regretted ten minutes into standing in the California heat. It rains down in a blur of white and gold as Paige and Maddox step out into it, hands linked and held high, grinning like two fools in love.

The crowd erupts around them—cheers, whistles, Eli shouting something I don’t quite catch—and I can’t stop smiling despite the ache that’s been sitting in my lower back since we left the apartment this morning.

“Careful.” Lockie’s hand finds the exact spot, his fingers like magic, his other hand coming to my elbow, steadying me as someone rushes past.

“I’m fine,” I murmur, glancing up at him.

He doesn’t look convinced, hasn’t in roughly three weeks, regardless of what I say.

Two months since the scare. Two months of his shoes permanently at my front door, his clothes in my wardrobe, his business materials spread across my home office. Two months of us—properly, finally, without the hedging—and I still catch myself sometimes looking at him from across the room, thinking about how much has changed.

We finished the nursery in the apartment, too. Him up a ladder, me sitting on the floor directing, telling him he’d missed a spot. By the time we’d finished, there was pale-yellow paint in his beard, on both my socks, and all the way down the hallway, and I couldn’t stop laughing as he trailed it through the apartment. Because this is what it was always supposed to feel like.

“You sure?” he asks, thumb still working at that spot.

“Yes.” I adjust my weight again, trying to find a position that doesn’t make every vertebra sing in protest. “I’m just standing, not scaling a mountain. Hush and watch the happy couple.”

His mouth twitches, and he presses in behind me, arms sliding around, hands settling beneath the bump. Then he lifts, taking the weight, and a low groan escapes me, my body immediately relaxing, the tension easing as I sag back into him.