#harry+styles

The silence after I don't know had somehow become louder with every passing day. Harry hadn't expected a grand declaration from Sadie. He hadn't expected tears or another conversation or even another therapy breakthrough before he left for Los Angeles. If anything, he'd imagined they'd drift back into the familiar rhythm they'd somehow mastered over the last few months: logistics, Jesse, polite exchanges at front doors, and careful avoidance of anything that felt remotely like hope.

Instead, she'd disappeared. Emotionally.

Their text messages had become almost clinical. Jesse had a good day. Can you send his blue trainers tomorrow? He's got a bit of a cough but I think it's hay fever. Every message revolved around their son, each one carrying the unmistakable feeling that Sadie had written it, read it back three times and deleted anything that might accidentally reveal how she was actually doing. Even their FaceTime calls had changed.

Where there had once been awkward conversation between them while Jesse wandered off to fetch another toy or insisted on showing Harry every dinosaur he owned, Sadie had somehow managed to remove herself from them almost entirely. Jesse now provided an enthusiastic, uninterrupted commentary of his entire day—what he'd painted at nursery, how Grandma Jo had let him stir the muffin batter, the fact that Bunny had apparently needed medicine because he'd "fallen down stairs" — while Sadie remained somewhere just beyond the edge of the camera, occasionally reminding him to say thank you or to hold the iPad properly.

When the call ended, she'd smile politely. "Say goodbye to Daddy."

"Love you, Jess."

"Love you!"

Then she'd appear for perhaps three seconds. "Bye, Harry."

And before he'd even had chance to answer properly the screen would go black.

It had happened four nights in a row and Harry knew why. The expression on her face after he'd said I don't know had stayed with him far more vividly than he'd expected. He'd seen devastation before. Fear. Panic. Grief. But there had been something uniquely heartbreaking about watching hope leave somebody's face in real time. He recognised it because he'd seen the same expression reflected back at him months earlier.

"Harry... I cheated on you."

He remembered sitting on the edge of their bed feeling as though someone had reached inside his chest and quietly removed every certainty he'd ever had about his life. He remembered looking at Sadie and knowing, before she'd even finished explaining, that nothing would ever feel uncomplicated again. Now the roles had reversed.

She'd asked whether she was fighting for something already gone. And all he'd had to offer her was I don't know.

He closed the zip of the suitcase a little harder than he'd intended. The bedroom looked exactly as it always had before he travelled, except now there was another small suitcase sitting open beside his own. Jesse's. Tiny T-shirts. Pyjamas with rockets on them. Enough socks to clothe an entire nursery class because Harry had learnt years ago that toddlers had an almost supernatural ability to lose them.

Two days.

In forty-eight hours they'd be boarding a flight to Los Angeles. Or, he frowned, were they? He stopped folding one of Jesse's jumpers halfway through. That had been the plan. Well not even the plan. More a conversation. Anne had offered almost immediately. She was more than happy to fly with Jesse, stay nearby for a few days until they settled, then fly him home after the residency finished. Sadie had agreed at the time because, realistically, there hadn't seemed another option. Harry couldn't exactly leave a three-year-old in London for two weeks, and the idea of not seeing Jesse for that long had made his chest tighten in a way he hadn't anticipated.

So everyone had nodded. Everyone had spoken as though it was decided. Except nobody had ever actually decided it. Not properly. Not with the practical reality of what two weeks in another country without his mum actually meant for Sadie. He rubbed tiredly at the back of his neck. The more he thought about it, the worse it felt. He'd been so focused on what Jesse needed that he wasn't entirely sure anyone had stopped to consider what it might feel like for Sadie to wake up every morning in London knowing her little boy was five thousand miles away. His phone vibrated across the bed before the thought could settle.

Sadie.

His stomach tightened and for a split second every awful possibility flashed through his mind. He answered before the second ring.

"Hey." He was already standing without realising it. "You okay? Jesse okay?"

"Yeah." Her voice sounded smaller than usual. "Yeah, Jesse's— he's fine."

Harry let out the breath he'd been holding.

"He's with Mum," Sadie added. Pausing before continuing. "I had therapy today." Something in the way she said it immediately told him that whatever this phone call was about, it wasn't actually about therapy. "It—" She stopped herself. "It doesn't matter."

"It probably does."

She laughed softly. Nothing was funny. It was the sort of breathy little laugh people gave when they were trying to stop themselves sounding frightened.

"I was just..." Another breath. "I was hoping I could speak to you if you've got time."

"Yeah. Of course." He didn't even think about it. He glanced automatically around the bedroom, already reaching for his keys.

"Did you want to come over? Or I can come to yours if that's easier."

"No," Sadie said quickly. "I want— I want to do it on the phone. If that's okay."

"It is."

"I just..." Another nervous laugh escaped her. "I think it's better."

Harry closed his eyes briefly. He knew exactly what she meant. If she couldn't see his face, she couldn't watch it fall. If he said no... She wouldn't have to witness it.

"I can hang up," she said quickly. "Honestly, it doesn't matter. I just thought I'd ask because therapy today sort of—" She stopped herself. "Anyway."

"Sadie."

"Mmm?"

"I'm listening."

He heard her take a deep breath. When she started speaking again, it was as though she'd decided the only way to get through it was not to stop. "Umm okay, how do I say this?" Another nervous breath. "I'm not really used to asking for things, which apparently was discussed for quite a while today." She laughed awkwardly. "I— I'm working on it."

Harry smiled faintly. Not that she could see it.

"I'd like to come to America. For— well for your residency. I know it's two weeks. I said four then because I was thinking about flights and..." She sighed at herself. "Ignore me. I've just..." Her voice softened, "I've never been away from Jesse for that long before. It makes me really anxious." She swallowed audibly before continuing, still speaking too quickly. "And I know you'll probably want your own space and I know you probably want time with Jesse because you don't get enough of it anyway and I promise I won't get in the way. I've already found somewhere nearby so I wouldn't be staying with you and I'd make my own arrangements and this isn't about me and you. It's about me and Jesse." She continued before he could respond. "I just— well if— another country feels really far away. I know that sounds ridiculous because planes exist and phones exist and—"

"Sadie." She stopped instantly. "Stop."

A quieter voice answered him. "Sorry. I went a bit fast."

"You think?"

"I know." Another tiny laugh. She took a slower breath this time. "It's not about asking permission."

"No."

"I just..." She searched carefully for the words now. "I wanted to ask whether you'd be comfortable with me coming." She sounded almost embarrassed. "I'll pay for everything myself."

"I know."

"I've already looked at hotels."

"I don't care."

"I won't interrupt your time with Jesse."

"I know you won't."

"I've just never been away from him for that long," she repeated. This time she didn't rush the feeling away. "I know two weeks probably doesn't sound like much."

"It does."

"It does. It feels enormous."

Harry looked across at Jesse's little suitcase still lying open on the bed. He imagined Sadie standing in their house after dropping them at Heathrow. Walking past Jesse's bedroom. Passing his little shoes by the front door. Knowing he was asleep in another country. He hadn't needed therapy to understand that.

"Yes." The answer came so quickly it almost surprised him. "Yes," he repeated. "Come. You don't have to convince me."

"I—" She sounded genuinely caught off guard. "I thought you'd need to think about it."

"I don't."

"You don't?"

"No." He smiled softly. "I think it's probably the most you've ever asked me for."

"I don't know whether that's true." He heard her breathe out a quite laugh.

"It is." He sat down on the edge of the bed again. "And yes because Jesse's going to want you. And yes because I think you'll need Jesse. "And—" He stopped himself for a second. "I'd quite like to talk to you." The silence on the other end of the line felt different now. Not uncomfortable. Just full. "I've been thinking about what I said."

"Oh." She knew immediately which words he meant.

"I don't really want the last proper conversation we have before America to be..." He couldn't quite bring himself to repeat them.

"I know." Her voice was almost a whisper. "I've been thinking about them too."

"So." He smiled sadly. "Come to LA."

There was another long silence before she answered. "Okay."

It was such a small word. But for the first time in days, it sounded like she'd finally let herself breathe.

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Harry had spent enough of his life flying privately that the strangeness of it had long since worn off, though there were still moments when the entire thing felt vaguely absurd to him. The quiet terminal away from the main airport, the polished cars pulling directly beside the aircraft, the luggage disappearing from their hands before anyone had properly decided whether they needed anything from it, all of it happened with such seamless efficiency that it barely registered anymore. He knew there were practical reasons for it. Security. Timing. Jesse. The fact that travelling commercially had become less about getting from one place to another and more about whether they could reach the gate without somebody filming the back of his head. Even so, there was something about watching his three-year-old son climb the narrow steps into a private jet with Bunny tucked beneath one arm and a packet of raisins held triumphantly in the other that made Harry feel as though his life had become ridiculous in ways he would never fully understand.

Jesse, naturally, had no such concerns. To him the jet was not an extravagant solution to an eleven-hour flight across the Atlantic but an enormous new room requiring immediate investigation, and he'd barely crossed the threshold before beginning to narrate everything he saw.

There were chairs that turned around, which he demonstrated before anyone had asked him to. There was a television bigger than the one in Nanny Jo's bedroom. There were tiny bottles of water in a drawer, a fact he announced loudly enough for the pilots to hear from the cockpit, and somewhere near the back of the cabin there was a bathroom with a door that folded in a way he found so fascinating that Paddy had eventually needed to redirect him before he trapped his fingers in it.

Harry had watched the commotion from the entrance while Jeff and Tommy spoke quietly with one of the crew about their arrival time, Anne attempting to persuade Jesse that perhaps they could wait until the plane had taken off before touching absolutely everything. Paddy moved through the space with the practised alertness that meant he looked relaxed only to people who didn't know him well, checking doors, speaking briefly to the pilot, then settling into a seat with a clear view of the cabin and the staircase leading towards the rear. It was familiar. Comfortable, even. The usual collection of people who had travelled with Harry often enough that the flight itself had become another extension of work and family life, a temporary little world suspended between one country and another.

Sadie was the only person who seemed unsure where she was allowed to exist inside it.

He noticed it before they'd even taken off. She had boarded behind Anne, one hand resting lightly against Jesse's back while he climbed the stairs, the other holding a leather tote Harry recognised from years ago because she'd bought it in Florence after insisting for nearly an hour that it was too expensive, only to use it so often afterwards that the handles had softened and darkened beneath her grip. She'd smiled politely at the crew, thanked them twice for taking her coat and then, rather than choosing any of the wider seats near Jesse or the sofa opposite Harry, had gone directly towards the rear of the cabin and settled into the single chair furthest from everyone else. It was close enough that she could still see their son, which Harry suspected had been the entire calculation, but far enough away that nobody could accuse her of assuming she belonged amongst them.

She'd insisted on booking her own flight when he'd first told her she could come. It wasn't dramatic or anything. Sadie rarely made a spectacle of anything, particularly now, but she'd begun listing commercial options almost immediately, talking about arriving a day later if necessary and finding transport from LAX as though the idea of taking the same aircraft required justification neither of them had asked for. Harry had shut that down before she'd managed to send him a screenshot of prices. They were all travelling to the same place, on the same day, with the same child. Having her sit alone on a commercial flight while Jesse crossed the Atlantic with him would have been stupid, and he'd told her so with enough bluntness that she'd gone quiet for several seconds before agreeing.

He hadn't told her the other reason. That eleven hours in the air had seemed useful. There were few places left in their lives where neither of them could leave.

At home, conversations could be interrupted by the need to collect Jesse or answer a door or walk into another room under the pretence of making tea. Therapy ended when Doctor Bennett looked at the clock. Phone calls could be abandoned with a quiet, I should go. Even the day at the Lido had allowed them to remain protected by movement and noise, by Jesse's constant needs and the peculiar intimacy of doing ordinary things in public.

A plane offered none of that. A plane required them to remain suspended in the same enclosed space long enough that, eventually, silence might become more uncomfortable than speaking.

Harry had also been prepared to tell her she could stay at the house in Los Angeles, though he'd stopped himself from doing that over the phone. He knew Sadie too well, even now. If he'd presented it as a decision, she would have heard obligation. If he'd told her she shouldn't waste money on somewhere else, she would have interpreted it as pity. If he'd said Jesse would prefer having them both under the same roof, she'd have agreed for their son's sake while quietly convincing herself Harry resented every minute of it.

With Sadie, certain things needed to arrive slowly enough that she could believe she'd chosen them. Or at least believe she was allowed to.

An hour into the flight, she was still sitting in the same chair. Her shoes had been removed and placed neatly beneath the table beside her, though rather than relaxing, she'd folded her legs beneath herself in a way that made her seem smaller, shoulders curved forwards as she stared down at something in her lap. A blanket remained folded beside her untouched. When one of the crew had offered breakfast, she'd accepted coffee and half a croissant before insisting she was fine, despite the fact Harry couldn't remember seeing her eat that morning. A pair of headphones rested around her neck, unused, and every few minutes she looked towards Jesse with the same quiet vigilance she'd carried since they entered the terminal, checking him almost unconsciously before turning away again. She had taken the promise not to be in his way and made it physical.

Harry found himself noticing the distance more than he wanted to. It wasn't simply that she'd chosen a seat away from him. It was the way she avoided looking settled, as though comfort might be interpreted as entitlement. Before everything, Sadie would've been beside Anne helping Jesse with whatever activity had currently consumed him, or stretched across the sofa with her feet in Harry's lap while she complained that the cabin was too cold. She would've stolen something from Jeff's plate, drawn an unflattering sketch of Tommy while he worked, then spent an hour pretending she'd fallen asleep so nobody would ask her to watch another film Harry had already seen three times.

She had once moved through his world without thinking about whether she belonged there. Now she behaved as though every room containing him came with invisible borders she was frightened to cross.

Jesse, thankfully, remained oblivious. Anne had produced a sticker book shortly after take-off with the efficiency of someone who had either raised two children or correctly anticipated that the excitement of an aircraft would last approximately forty minutes before transforming into boredom. It was filled with animals dressed as people, which Jesse found endlessly entertaining, though he seemed less interested in placing the stickers where the pages intended than covering a cartoon giraffe with tiny sunglasses and attaching a chef's hat to what appeared to be a crocodile.

"No, darling, that one's meant to go on the bear," Anne explained patiently, attempting to peel a miniature pair of wellington boots from Jesse's finger before he stuck them to the table.

"The bear don't want shoes."

"Doesn't he?"

"No. He wants them feet."

Anne glanced at the page. "He is wearing them on his feet."

"Not those feet."

Harry smiled to himself as he watched from the sofa opposite, though his attention drifted again almost immediately towards Sadie. She hadn't looked up for several minutes now. Her hand moved steadily over the paper in front of her, the familiar motion enough for him to realise she was drawing before he could properly see what she'd found to draw on.

Not her sketchbook but instead an airport leaflet. He recognised the glossy blue edge of it from the private terminal, one of those unnecessarily elegant brochures offering information about lounges and transfers to people who had likely already arranged both. She'd folded it open across her lap and turned the blank reverse side upwards, drawing with a biro she'd probably found inside her handbag. From where he sat, Harry could only make out a series of dark, repeated lines. The shape of a coffee cup, perhaps, or the window frame beside her. She wasn't sketching because the subject interested her. She was sketching because she needed somewhere to put her hands. Sadie had always drawn when she was anxious.

Harry remembered learning that early in their relationship, before he understood the difference between the work she made deliberately and the things that appeared almost unconsciously whenever her thoughts became too loud. In restaurants she drew forks, candleholders, the profile of strangers at nearby tables. In hospitals she'd once filled three pages with studies of his trainers while they waited for Jesse's blood test results, each one more detailed than the last. On the morning of their wedding, she'd drawn the hotel window from six different angles while her hair was being done because everyone kept asking whether she was nervous and she hadn't wanted to answer.

He still knew that about her.

The recognition settled somewhere uncomfortable inside him. There were moments lately when the affair had made their entire marriage feel unknowable, as though one revelation had contaminated everything that came before it, forcing him to question whether familiarity itself had been an illusion. Then Sadie would tuck her feet beneath herself when she was cold, or rub her thumb against the side of a pen while she thought, and he'd be reminded that twelve years could not be erased simply because the ending had become difficult to understand.

Anne followed his gaze. Harry knew she'd done so because her hands slowed over the sticker book, though she didn't say anything immediately. She helped Jesse press a silver star onto the crocodile's stomach, admired it with the required seriousness and then leaned back slightly in her chair, turning towards Harry only once Jesse had become distracted by a page of farm animals.

"Go and speak to her," she murmured.

Harry looked at her as though he hadn't heard properly. "What?"

Anne's expression didn't change. It was the same look she'd used throughout his childhood whenever he attempted to pretend confusion might absolve him of doing something she'd already decided was necessary. She tipped her chin almost imperceptibly towards the back of the cabin. "Now would be a good time."

"For what?"

"To speak to your wife."

He glanced towards Sadie again before lowering his voice. "I know who you mean."

"Do you?"

"Mum."

Anne's mouth curved, though not quite into a smile. "You've been staring at her since we took off."

"I haven't."

"You have."

"I'm looking around the plane."

"It's a plane. Same as all the others."

Harry rubbed a hand over his mouth, partly to hide the reluctant smile threatening at the corner of it. "She might want to be left alone."

Anne gave him a look so patient it bordered on insulting. "She might. You could always go over there and ask her."

There were times when Harry found the certainty of mothers deeply irritating, particularly when it arrived dressed as common sense. Anne turned back to Jesse before he could argue further, apparently satisfied that the conversation was over, and began helping him locate a sticker of a tractor while Harry remained where he was for another few seconds, aware that she would notice if he didn't move and equally aware that she would be unbearable about it later.

His duffel bag sat open beside his feet. He leaned down as casually as he could manage, though there was nothing casual about the sudden awareness of everybody else in the cabin or the fact that crossing ten feet of carpet had somehow begun to feel more intimidating than walking onto a stage. Beneath a jumper, two books and the folder Tommy had given him containing notes for the residency, his fingers found the worn black cover of Sadie's sketchbook. He had meant to return it sooner. That was the excuse he'd given himself, anyway.

Anne had found it at Wembley during the London residency, abandoned in one of the dressing rooms after Sadie left. She'd handed it to Harry, assuming he'd see her before she did, and he'd placed it in his bag intending to return it the following day. Then the days became complicated. Their conversations reduced themselves to arrangements about Jesse. The sketchbook travelled from one bag to another, then sat for weeks on the desk in his bedroom before he packed it for Los Angeles almost without thinking.

He hadn't opened it. That's a lie. He had. But after one look through he couldn't look at it again. Harry had not wanted to become someone who searched through her private thoughts looking for additional reasons to hurt himself. Still, carrying it had felt strange. It was an object so distinctly hers that every time he noticed the frayed elastic or the faint smudge of charcoal along the spine, he felt as though he'd somehow taken possession of something he had no right to keep.

He stood with it in his hand. Anne didn't look up, though the tiny lift at the corner of her mouth told him she knew he'd listened.

Harry made a poor attempt at appearing relaxed as he crossed the cabin. He paused briefly beside the small counter to take a bottle of water he didn't need, then continued towards the rear as though sitting opposite Sadie had occurred to him naturally rather than requiring maternal intervention. She didn't notice him at first. Her head remained bent over the leaflet, hair falling forwards across one side of her face as she worked the biro repeatedly across the same patch of paper.

It was a cup. The coffee cup sitting beside her. She'd drawn it four times.

Harry stopped beside the empty seat opposite. Sadie's hand stilled before she looked up, surprise moving openly across her face as though she had spent the last hour making herself so unobtrusive she'd forgotten somebody might choose to approach her.

"Hi," she said. It wasn't quite a question, but it carried the uncertainty of one.

"Hi." He gestured towards the chair. "Can I?"

Her eyes flickered towards the empty seat before returning to him. "Yeah. Of course."

Harry sat, placing the unnecessary bottle of water on the table between them. Up close, he could see she'd drawn the cup from several angles, one version detailed enough to include the tiny crease where the cardboard sleeve had bent beneath her fingers. There were other unfinished shapes around it: the curve of the window, Jesse's abandoned raisin box, the edge of Anne's profile from across the cabin. Sadie shifted the leaflet slightly as though embarrassed to have been caught.

"I didn't bring anything to draw on," she explained, even though he hadn't asked. "Well, I thought I had a notebook in my bag, but apparently I packed three chargers and no actual paper."

Harry smiled faintly. "Useful."

"Very."

She glanced towards his hands then, her expression changing when he placed the sketchbook on the table and slid it quietly into her line of sight. For a moment, she didn't react.

Her gaze settled on the black cover, then on the frayed elastic wrapped around it, and Harry watched recognition arrive slowly enough that it seemed to stop the rest of her entirely. The biro remained suspended between her fingers. Her lips parted, though no sound came at first, and then she reached for it with both hands as though she was afraid the book might disappear again if she moved too quickly.

"My sketchbook."

Harry nodded. "Yeah."

She looked up at him in disbelief. "I've been looking everywhere for this."

"You left it at Wembley."

"At Wembley?"

"In the dressing room. Mum found it after you'd gone."

Sadie stared down at the cover, running her thumb over one of the softened corners. "I thought I'd lost it. I checked the house, my studio, Mum's car... I even called a restaurant I went to because I thought I might've left it under the table."

Harry watched her pull it against her chest, the gesture so instinctive and unexpectedly tender that it made the book seem less like an object than something returned alive.

"I should've given it back sooner," he said. "I kept meaning to."

She shook her head quickly, still holding it close. "No, it doesn't matter. You gave it back now." Her eyes lifted to his again, relief softening something in her face that had remained tense since they boarded. "Thank you, Harry."

The gratitude in her voice was disproportionate to the act, which made him wonder how long she'd believed it was gone and what else she'd assumed she had no right to recover. He wanted to tell her it had never been lost, not really. That it had remained in his room, then his bag, carried carefully between places while he tried to understand whether returning it meant anything beyond the obvious.

Instead, he settled back into the chair opposite her and watched as she loosened the elastic, opened the cover and touched the first page with the quiet familiarity of someone checking that the contents remained exactly where she'd left them. For the first time since he'd crossed the cabin, Sadie looked less like a guest. Not entirely herself but closer.

For several seconds neither of them spoke. Sadie kept the sketchbook resting against her chest, one hand wrapped around the spine while the other remained tucked beneath the cover as though she needed to feel the weight of it before she could quite believe it was hers again. Harry watched her turn it over once, glance at the elastic, then smooth her palm across the front with the absent-minded care she usually reserved for Jesse's hair when he was half-asleep.

There was something about the relief in her face that made him feel faintly guilty, not because he had deliberately kept it from her, but because he'd known for weeks exactly where it was while she had apparently been searching through every room of her life for it.

"I genuinely thought it had gone," she said eventually, her voice quieter now that the initial surprise had settled. "I kept trying to remember the last place I'd used it and everything after Wembley is a bit..." She stopped, the sentence folding in on itself before she could finish it. "Well. You know."

Harry did know. The residency had become one of those periods neither of them could refer to without immediately brushing against something painful: the dressing rooms, the unanswered messages, the night Sadie left before the show had finished, Jesse asleep somewhere backstage while their marriage quietly disintegrated around him. He wondered whether the sketchbook had been lost to her for the same reason so many other details from those weeks seemed to have disappeared, not through carelessness but because surviving the larger things had left very little room for remembering where she'd put anything down.

"I should've mentioned it," he said. "I found it in my bag a couple of times and kept thinking I'd bring it over when I saw you, then every time I did see you it was..." He gave a small, awkward shrug. "Usually at a front door with Jesse between us."

Sadie nodded as though that explanation made complete sense. "You didn't have to carry it all the way to Los Angeles."

"I didn't carry it specifically for Los Angeles."

Her mouth twitched. "Right."

"I packed the bag quickly."

"Of course."

Harry narrowed his eyes slightly at the familiar note of amusement entering her voice. "I did."

"I didn't say anything."

"You did with your face."

For the briefest moment, something easy passed between them. It wasn't enough to erase the strange distance of the previous days, nor did it resemble the careless intimacy they'd once shared, but it was recognisable. A fragment of an older rhythm. Sadie smiled down at the sketchbook as though she had noticed it too and didn't quite trust herself to look directly at him while it was happening.

Harry allowed the quiet to return, though this time it felt less brittle. He could hear Jesse several seats away explaining to Anne that the pig sticker was not allowed near the tractor because the tractor was "doing dangerous work," Jeff and Tommy speaking in low voices near the front of the cabin, the steady, softened roar of the engines beneath everything. Clouds pressed bright and endless against the windows, leaving the aircraft suspended in a world without landmarks or time, and Harry remembered why he'd wanted her on this flight in the first place.

He shifted slightly in his seat. "Can we talk?"

Sadie's fingers tightened around the edge of the sketchbook. It was subtle enough that somebody else might not have noticed, but Harry did. Her shoulders didn't stiffen dramatically and she didn't look frightened, yet something in her expression changed almost immediately, the small warmth that had appeared moments earlier retreating behind caution as she closed the book and rested it carefully in her lap.

"Yeah," she said. "Of course." She sat a little straighter, as though preparing herself to receive information rather than take part in a conversation, and Harry had barely begun deciding where to start before she carried on. "Actually, I was going to speak to you about the house."

He paused. "The house?"

"In Los Angeles." She nodded quickly. "I think I've found somewhere. It isn't far from where you're staying, at least I don't think it is. The map made it look close, but I know everything in LA takes about forty minutes even when it's supposedly ten minutes away, so I might be wrong." She gave a small, nervous laugh and reached for the airport leaflet she'd been drawing on, though there was nothing on it that could possibly help her now. "It's a serviced apartment. Or maybe more like a guesthouse. The photographs are a bit confusing, but it has a kitchen and enough room for Jesse if he wants to stay with me some nights, and I know it's very last-minute, but the woman said she could hold it until we land if I—"

"Sadie." She stopped. Harry rested his forearms against his knees, leaning forwards enough that she couldn't mistake his interruption for impatience. "You'll stay with us."

The words seemed to take a moment to reach her.

"At the house," he added. "In LA."

Her brows drew together slightly. "Harry, you don't have to—"

"I know."

"I've already nearly sorted something."

"Nearly isn't sorted."

"She said she'd hold it."

"Then tell her you don't need it."

Sadie looked down at the sketchbook again, her thumb finding the frayed elastic and worrying gently at one loose strand. "I just don't want to be in the way."

The phrase irritated him more than it should have, perhaps because he'd spent the entire first hour of the flight watching her build herself around it. She had boarded the plane promising not to intrude, chosen the furthest chair, accepted the smallest amount of food, and now she was attempting to rent another house rather than risk occupying a spare bedroom in one that had more than enough space for all of them.

"Why do you keep saying that? That you're going to be in the way," Harry continued, trying to keep the frustration from sharpening his voice. "You said it on the phone. You've said it about the flight. Now you're saying it about the house."

Sadie's expression shifted, not towards defensiveness but uncertainty, as though she hadn't realised how often she'd repeated it until he placed the words together for her. "I don't know."

"You aren't in the way."

"I know, I just—"

"No, you don't know."

She went quiet. Harry sat back slightly, aware that he was in danger of turning an invitation into another argument and hating how easily that still happened between them. He hadn't crossed the cabin to make her feel cornered. He had wanted to tell her she could stay with them, return her sketchbook, perhaps begin explaining what he'd meant in therapy. Instead, within minutes, he had already found himself pushing against a belief she had apparently carried onto the aircraft with her.

Sadie stared at the cover in her lap for several seconds before speaking again. "Sorry. I'm not explaining it properly."

"You don't need to apologise."

"I know." She breathed out slowly, visibly forcing herself not to rush into the next sentence. "I'm trying not to do that."

Harry waited.

She looked towards the window, watching sunlight move across the wing before bringing her attention back to him. "I don't mean that I think you'd deliberately make me feel unwelcome. I know you wouldn't. And I don't mean that I think Jesse shouldn't have both of us there, because obviously he'd probably prefer that." Her fingers shifted around the book again, but this time she seemed to notice the movement and deliberately placed both hands flat across it. "I think I keep saying I don't want to be in the way because I don't know how else to say that I don't want this to be too much for you."

Harry frowned slightly.

"Me coming on the trip was already a lot," she continued. "Even though it's for Jesse, and even though you said yes, it changes everything you'd planned. Me staying in the same house changes it again. You'd have to be around me every morning and every night, and after what I said in therapy..." Her voice softened around the memory. "After asking whether I should fight for us and putting that on you when you didn't have an answer, I don't want it to look like I'm now following you to another country and parading myself around in front of you until you feel pressured to give me one."

There was no accusation in it. No suggestion that Harry had made her feel this way. If anything, she sounded embarrassed by the possibility that her presence could be interpreted as strategy, as though wanting proximity to her own husband and son was something potentially manipulative that needed to be carefully disclaimed.

"I don't think you're parading anything in front of me," he said.

"I know you're not saying that."

"Then where is it coming from?"

Sadie opened her mouth, but no answer arrived immediately. He watched her consider several versions of the truth before choosing one that seemed to frighten her slightly more than the others.

"I think I project my own worries and frame them as yours." Harry stayed very still. She gave a short, self-conscious laugh. "That sounded incredibly rehearsed."

"Did your therapist say it?"

"No. She made me work it out myself, which was much more irritating."

Harry smiled.

Sadie looked down again, though she continued before the moment could become an escape. "I think I worry that being around me will be painful for you, or annoying, or that you'll feel trapped, and instead of admitting those are my fears, I tell myself they're things you've already decided. Then I behave according to a conversation we haven't actually had."

It was so close to what he'd tried to explain in Doctor Bennett's office that Harry felt the words land somewhere deep and unexpectedly tender. He had told her how exhausting it was to be assigned emotions before he'd had the chance to feel them, how often she'd decided he was angry or disappointed or finished before asking him. Now, only days later, she had caught herself doing it.

Not perfectly. Not before it affected anything. But she had caught it.

Sadie drew in another breath. "So let me start again."

Harry nodded.

"I don't want staying at the house to be too much for you," she said carefully. "Not because I know that it will be. I don't. I'm asking whether it would be."

There was something so deliberate in the correction that Harry found himself wishing Lydia Bennett could hear it, not because Sadie needed praise for speaking plainly, but because he understood how unnatural the act still felt to her. She had removed every assumed answer and left only the question, which meant the responsibility of responding now belonged entirely to him.

"It won't be too much."

Sadie searched his face, perhaps looking for hesitation he hadn't placed there. "You don't have to say yes because it's easier for Jesse."

"I'm not."

"Or because Anne thinks—"

"My mum has opinions about everything. I don't organise my entire life around them."

From several seats away, Anne looked up briefly as though she'd heard her name despite the lowered voices, then returned to the sticker book with a small expression Harry chose not to interpret.

Sadie almost smiled. "She'll be devastated to hear that."

"She'll survive."

Harry leaned forwards again, keeping his voice quiet. "Believe me when I say I wouldn't suggest it if I wasn't okay with it."

She held his gaze for several seconds, and he could see the old instinct working behind her eyes, the urge to test the sentence from every angle until she found the hidden obligation inside it. This time, however, she seemed to stop herself before the thought could become language.

"Okay," she said at last. The word was cautious, but it wasn't disbelieving.

Harry nodded once. "Okay."

Sadie looked down at the sketchbook, then lifted it slightly between them. "Thank you. For the house, I mean. And for this."

"You've thanked me for that already."

"I know, but I've been looking for it for weeks."

"You said."

"I was genuinely starting to think Jesse had drawn in it and hidden it somewhere because he thought I'd be cross."

Harry's mouth curved. "Would you have been?"

"No." She considered it. "Yes. Maybe briefly."

"Then he was right to hide it."

The smile that appeared on her face this time was fuller, arriving before she could moderate it, and for a second Harry saw her as she'd been before the distance between them required every expression to be examined for possible meaning. It unsettled him how quickly warmth could return, not because it was unwanted, but because his body still recognised it as home even when the rest of him remained unsure whether home was somewhere he could safely return to.

He had meant to continue. The words were already forming, an explanation of the answer he'd given in therapy and the days he'd spent replaying the look on her face afterwards. He wanted to tell her that I don't know had not meant no, that uncertainty was not the same thing as absence, and that part of the reason he had invited her into the house was because he was tired of speaking only when somebody else created the space for it.

Before he could begin, a small hand appeared against Sadie's knee.

"Mummy."

They both looked down. Jesse stood beside her chair holding the sticker book open against his chest, several loose animals attached to his jumper and one silver star pressed near his elbow. Anne remained seated across the cabin, watching him with the resigned expression of someone who had been informed her services were no longer required.

"Mummy, you play stickers with me?"

Sadie's entire face changed. The tension in her shoulders loosened before she had even answered, one hand reaching automatically to straighten the page Jesse was crushing against himself. "Hi, Jess. Yeah, of course I'll play."

"The cow needs a hat."

"Does she?"

"She going party."

"A party cow." Sadie nodded gravely, shifting towards the edge of her seat. "That makes sense."

Jesse held out his hand, already assuming she would follow, and Sadie rose with the sketchbook tucked safely beneath one arm. Before stepping away, she glanced back towards Harry, some remnant of their unfinished conversation remaining between them.

"Thank you," she said again, though this time he understood she meant more than the book.

Harry watched her cross the cabin with Jesse, allowing himself to be led towards the broad rug between Anne's chair and the sofa. She lowered herself onto the floor without hesitation, folding her legs beneath her as Jesse immediately began explaining an elaborate system of rules involving hats, farm animals and which stickers were apparently married to one another. Within moments she was absorbed in it, asking questions with complete seriousness while he pressed a crown onto the head of a sheep and declared it the mummy.

Anne looked across at Harry over Jesse's bent head. She didn't smile triumphantly or mouth I told you so, though he could see both impulses somewhere in her expression. She only gave him the smallest nod before passing Sadie another sheet of stickers, the gesture quiet enough that nobody else would have noticed.

Harry remained in the seat opposite the abandoned airport leaflet, looking at the four versions of the same coffee cup and the empty space where Sadie's sketchbook had been.

They had not spoken about therapy. Not properly. They had not discussed what living together in Los Angeles might mean beyond bedrooms and Jesse and the practical ease of being under one roof. He still didn't know whether bringing her closer was wise, or whether two weeks of ordinary family routines would only make the eventual separation more painful. But she had asked for something. He had answered without making her earn it. For now, that felt like enough.

──────────────

The house looked exactly as Harry remembered it and somehow less familiar than he expected. It had always been one of those places that existed more in photographs than memory, all pale stone, wide glass doors and rooms designed to hold more people than either of them ever brought with them. They had bought it years ago because hotels had become impractical and because there was something comforting, at least in theory, about having a front door that belonged to them in a city where so much of Harry's life was temporary. In practice, they had never spent enough time there for it to become home. There were clothes in the wardrobes and food in the cupboards, photographs chosen by an interior designer and a few books Sadie had left behind after previous trips, but the place still carried the polished neutrality of somewhere waiting for its real occupants to arrive.

Even when things between them had been good, Los Angeles had always been about work. Rehearsals, meetings, award shows, recordings, long days that began before Jesse woke and ended after he was asleep. The house had been familiar enough to feel better than a hotel, but never intimate enough to hold the small evidence of their life properly. Jesse didn't care about any of that.

He had been awake for almost the entire drive from the airport despite rubbing his eyes every few minutes and insisting he wasn't tired, and the second Paddy opened the front door, he surged forwards with the kind of renewed energy only children seemed capable of producing after eleven hours in the air. Sadie had barely managed to step inside before his hand closed around two of her fingers and began dragging her deeper into the house, Bunny tucked beneath his opposite arm and his trainers squeaking against the stone floor as he discovered each new detail with complete astonishment.

"Mummy, look. Pool."

Sadie let herself be pulled towards the glass doors overlooking the garden, her carry-on still hanging from one shoulder. "I can see it."

"It's a big pool. Can I swim now?"

"Not now, sweetheart."

"Why?"

"Because you've been awake for approximately a hundred years."

Jesse ignored this and tugged her towards the kitchen instead, apparently deciding that the pool could wait now that he'd noticed the enormous island in the centre of the room. "Look, Mummy. Kitchen!"

Sadie glanced over her shoulder towards Harry, the exhaustion in her face softened by reluctant amusement. "We have one of those at home."

"This one different."

"How?"

He considered this for a moment before pointing towards a bowl of lemons on the counter. "It has yellow."

Harry watched her laugh, the sound quieter than it had once been but no longer quite as guarded as it had been on the plane. Jesse continued his tour without waiting for anyone else to catch up, pointing out a rug as though he'd personally discovered it, then a framed photograph on the wall, then a low cabinet whose only notable feature seemed to be that he could see his reflection in the polished surface. Sadie followed willingly, responding to each announcement with the patience of someone who understood that the house was not impressive to him because it was large or expensive but because it was new, and newness at three years old deserved to be explained in full.

By the time they reached the bottom of the stairs, Jesse's enthusiasm had begun to lose its edges. His steps slowed, and he leaned more heavily against Sadie's arm while insisting on looking upwards towards the landing. She noticed immediately, adjusting her grip until she could lift him without disturbing Bunny.

"How about we find your room?" she asked, settling him against her hip. "Then maybe we have a little sleep."

"I don't need sleep."

"No?"

"No." His answer dissolved into a yawn so enormous it made Harry smile.

Sadie kissed the side of his head. "That was very convincing."

Jesse muttered something into her shoulder about only closing his eyes for one minute, and she began climbing the stairs with him, her voice growing softer as she promised they would explore the rest of the house afterwards and perhaps look at the pool properly once his body no longer believed it was the middle of the night. Harry remained near the kitchen doorway, listening to her steps recede along the landing until the sound of Jesse's questions faded behind a bedroom door.

When he turned back, Anne was watching him. She hadn't moved far from the entrance. Her handbag sat on the console behind her, her coat folded over one arm, and the expression on her face was so familiar that Harry felt irritated before she'd even spoken.

"What now?" he asked.

Anne lifted her brows. "I haven't said anything. I'm simply standing here."

"Watching me."

"I am allowed to look at my own son."

Harry rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, exhaustion from the flight beginning to settle into his bones now that the movement had stopped. "Mum, please. Whatever it is, just say it."

Anne's mouth curved slightly, though she seemed to consider whether to let him suffer a little longer before relenting. "Alright." She placed her coat over the back of a chair and leaned lightly against the kitchen island. "I think you're beginning the process."

Harry frowned. "The process of what?"

"You tell me."

"Very helpful."

"Forgiving her. Moving past it. Finding a way to live with it. Whatever words you eventually decide fit."

He looked away almost immediately, gaze drifting towards the stairs as though Sadie might somehow hear them through the floor. "I don't know if that's what I'm doing."

"I know."

Anne's voice softened. "I'm not saying you've decided anything. And I'm not trying to pressure you into deciding. I only mean that I've noticed a change."

Harry leaned both hands against the counter opposite her, staring down at the pale stone between them. "What change?"

"You're letting moments happen." The answer was simple enough that he looked up. Anne continued before he could dismiss it. "At the Lido. On the plane. Just now. You spend time with her and sometimes, for a few minutes, you aren't measuring everything against what happened."

Harry gave a short, humourless laugh. "Then I remember and feel guilty for forgetting."

"I know you do." Anne's expression held no judgement, only the patient recognition of someone who had watched him punish himself in a hundred different ways across his life. "You think anger proves you haven't minimised what she did. So whenever you aren't angry, you drag yourself back into it."

Harry looked down again, his fingers shifting against the edge of the counter. It was irritating how accurately she had named something he'd barely managed to understand himself. There were moments now when he laughed at something Sadie said or watched her soothe Jesse and allowed the familiarity to feel good before a second voice arrived almost immediately, accusing him of weakness, reminding him that people who had been betrayed were supposed to remain certain in their pain.

"Sometimes I catch myself," he admitted. "Like on the plane. We were talking and it felt..." He searched for the word, then gave up. "Normal, I suppose. Not normal exactly. Just easy for a second. Then I have this thought like, how are you sitting here smiling? How are you not furious every minute?"

Anne waited.

"And other times I don't stop it," he continued, his voice quieter now. "I just let it happen. I let Jesse sit between us or I ask her something or we talk about stupid things, and afterwards I don't know what that means. I don't know whether it means I'm forgiving her or whether I'm tired or whether I just miss my wife. I don't even know how to make sentences about it without sounding like I'm contradicting myself."

"You probably are contradicting yourself." Harry looked at her. Anne shrugged gently. "That doesn't mean one feeling is false. It means you have more than one."

He breathed out through his nose, not quite a laugh. "My therapy's rubbing off on you."

"I've always been very wise."

"You've always been very nosy."

"That too."

The warmth between them lasted only a moment before Harry's expression became thoughtful again. "I don't know what to call any of it."

"You don't have to call it anything yet."

He nodded, though he wasn't sure whether he believed her. Names had always made things easier. Husband. Father. Betrayed. Separated. They gave shape to experiences that otherwise spread too far in every direction. Whatever was happening now resisted that kind of order. He could still be furious and want her near him. He could mistrust her and know exactly how she took her coffee. He could imagine leaving and still feel the whole house change when she walked into it.

Footsteps sounded faintly on the stairs before either of them could continue. Sadie appeared a few seconds later, one hand trailing along the banister as though she wasn't entirely certain whether she was entering the room at the wrong moment. Her hair had loosened around her face during the flight, and there was a softness to her expression that suggested Jesse's sleep had come easily enough to calm them both.

"I didn't think he'd fall asleep so quickly in a new place," she began, speaking quietly out of habit even though the bedroom was upstairs. "But it didn't take mu—" She stopped when she realised neither Harry nor Anne had moved. "Oh." Her gaze shifted between them. "Sorry. Did I interrupt something?"

Anne answered before Harry could. "Don't be silly, love. I'm only exercising my right to be an annoying mother."

Harry let out a quiet laugh, and after a brief hesitation, Sadie smiled too. The exchange was so ordinary that it softened the room immediately, removing the awkward sense that she'd walked into something private and potentially about her. Anne stepped away from the island and crossed towards Sadie, pressing a kiss against her cheek with the same easy affection she had shown her for years, though Harry noticed the way Sadie's eyes closed for half a second as if even kindness required effort not to flinch from now.

"I'm going to sit outside before Jesse wakes up and demands the pool," Anne said. "You two can continue being painfully serious without me."

"We weren't being serious," Harry replied.

Anne glanced at him. "Of course not."

She collected her sunglasses from her handbag and disappeared through the glass doors towards the garden, leaving them alone in a room that suddenly felt much larger without her.

For a few seconds neither of them spoke. Sadie remained near the foot of the stairs, hands loosely clasped in front of her, while Harry stayed behind the kitchen island with enough distance between them to make the arrangement feel formal. Outside, Anne lowered herself onto one of the loungers beside the pool and opened her phone, apparently determined to prove she had no intention of watching them through the glass.

Sadie broke the silence first. "Thank you again."

Harry's shoulders dropped slightly. "Sadie."

"For the flight," she clarified quickly. "And for letting me stay here. I do appreciate it."

"You're welcome," he said, then shook his head before she could retreat behind politeness again. "But you need to stop thanking me like I wouldn't have offered."

Her brows pulled together. "What do you mean?"

"I mean it's insulting."

She stared at him, genuinely taken aback. "Insulting?"

"Yes."

"I wasn't trying to insult you."

"I know you weren't." He moved around the island, stopping several feet away rather than keeping the furniture between them. "But every time you thank me for something basic, it sounds like you think I might've refused it. Like I would've happily taken Jesse to another country for two weeks and left you behind if you hadn't asked carefully enough."

Sadie's mouth parted, but no immediate answer came.

"Whatever is happening between us is one thing," Harry continued, keeping his voice calm even as the thought tightened something in his chest. "But you're his mum. You are always going to be his mum. That doesn't disappear because our marriage is complicated."

Her expression changed almost at once, guilt arriving where confusion had been. "Sorry. I didn't mean it like that."

"You don't have to apologise."

"I know, but I—" She stopped herself, closing her eyes briefly before beginning again. "I think I'm struggling to separate the two sometimes."

Harry waited.

"The marriage and everything else," she explained. "When I think about what I've done to you, it makes me question what I'm still allowed to expect from you. Then I forget that some things aren't favours between husband and wife. They're just... us being Jesse's parents."

Harry nodded slowly. "Exactly."

Sadie looked relieved that he'd understood, though the feeling didn't entirely settle her. She glanced towards the stairs, perhaps checking for any sign that Jesse had woken, then back towards him. "I'm trying."

"I know."

The simplicity of his answer seemed to affect her more than he intended. She held his gaze for a moment before looking away, and Harry found himself thinking again about the conversation on the plane, about how quickly she had corrected herself when she realised she was assigning him feelings he hadn't expressed. There were changes happening, small and awkward and easy to miss if he remained determined only to measure the damage.

"I'd like to talk about therapy," he said.

Sadie's attention returned to him immediately.

"Not right now necessarily," he added, seeing the nerves surface in her face. "And not in some enormous, awful conversation the second we've arrived. I just mean while we're here."

She remained very still.

"I'd like us to talk," he continued. "Outside of the sessions. About what happened in them, or about anything really. I don't want Doctor Bennett's office to be the only place we can say something honest to each other."

Sadie swallowed. "Okay."

"Nothing too heavy at first." A faint, uncertain smile touched his mouth. "Maybe we start with actual sentences and work our way up."

She almost laughed, though the sound caught somewhere beneath her nervousness. "What do you think that would look like?"

"I don't know." Harry considered it. "Coffee. Sitting outside. Talking after Jesse's gone to bed. Not forcing anything, but not pretending there isn't anything to say either."

Sadie looked towards the pool where Anne remained stretched beneath the afternoon sun, then around the unfamiliar kitchen, as though she needed somewhere neutral to rest her eyes while she understood what he was offering. It wasn't forgiveness. Harry knew that, and he suspected she did too. But it was space. Time that belonged to them rather than Jesse or therapy or the mechanics of separation.

"Would you want to do that?" he asked.

Her answer didn't come immediately, and for one brief second Harry worried he had misread her uncertainty as fear when it might actually be reluctance. Then Sadie drew a careful breath and nodded.

"Yes." The word arrived too quickly, followed by another as though she needed to reinforce it. "Yes. I would."

Harry studied her face. "Are you sure?"

"I'm nervous."

"That's not the same thing."

"I know." She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, an old habit that returned whenever she felt exposed. "I'm nervous because I know there are things you're going to say that will hurt, and things I'll probably say badly, and I don't want to make any of it worse."

"You might." Her eyes widened slightly. Harry softened the truth with a small shrug. "So might I."

Sadie considered that before nodding. "But I want to," she said. "Even if it's uncomfortable. Even if I get it wrong at first." Her voice grew quieter, though not less certain. "I'll do whatever it takes."

Harry felt the words settle between them, heavy with intention and impossible promises. He didn't want her to offer everything. He didn't want another version of Sadie who twisted herself into whatever shape she imagined he required, mistaking self-erasure for devotion.

"Not whatever it takes," he said gently. "Just... tell the truth."

She frowned but held his gaze. Then, after a moment, she nodded. "Okay."

──────────────

Harry had insisted on arriving in Los Angeles a full week before the first show, and although Jeff had initially questioned whether seven days was excessive for what was technically a two-week residency, Harry had refused to be hurried into it. He knew himself well enough by now to understand that throwing his body straight from an eleven-hour flight into rehearsals, press, soundchecks and the particular kind of sleepless anticipation that arrived before a run of shows would only make everything worse. Jesse needed time to understand the new house, the new time zone and the fact that morning apparently happened while London was already halfway through the afternoon. Harry needed time to sleep without an alarm, to take his son for breakfast, to sit with the quiet before thousands of people began asking him to be loud again. And, though he had not said it aloud when they arranged the flights, he suspected Sadie needed the space too. Los Angeles was far enough from home to strip away some of the routines they had learnt to hide behind, but not so immediate that they were expected to use every second productively.

Their first evening barely counted. By five o’clock, Jesse had fallen asleep on the sofa with one hand still inside a bowl of dry cereal, Anne had retreated to the guesthouse at the back of the property after declaring herself too old to pretend jet lag was a mindset, and Sadie had disappeared upstairs with a tired promise that she would unpack tomorrow. Harry had lasted perhaps another forty minutes before waking with his cheek pressed into the arm of a chair and the television showing the silent menu screen of a film he had never started. Nobody mentioned the day afterwards because none of them had truly inhabited it.

The second night felt more real. Jesse had resisted bedtime. He wanted another story, then water, then the curtains open, then closed, then open only enough so he could see whether the moon in America looked different from the one at home. Harry had answered every question with decreasing coherence, eventually lying beside him on top of the duvet while Jesse traced the rose tattoo on his forearm with one small finger and asked why it had no colours. By the time his son’s breathing finally evened out, Harry had lost track of which country his body believed it was in. He remained there for several minutes longer than necessary, watching Jesse sleep beneath the unfamiliar light from the hallway, struck again by the strange elasticity of childhood. Jesse had been unsettled by the journey, excited by the house, clingy with both parents and suspicious of the bedroom for all of ten minutes, yet sleep had arrived eventually and claimed him as completely as it would have in London. Harry envied the certainty of it. Adults carried place and history inside them. Children, at least for a while, accepted comfort wherever someone they loved tucked the duvet around their shoulders.

He eased himself out of the room, leaving the door slightly open, and walked downstairs expecting to find the house empty. Anne had gone to bed early after spending most of the afternoon in the garden with Jesse. Jeff and Tommy were staying elsewhere. Paddy had taken the room nearest the entrance but had vanished behind his own door an hour ago. The kitchen lights had been dimmed, the glass walls reflecting parts of the living room back into themselves, and for a moment Harry thought Sadie had gone upstairs too. Then he saw her outside.

She was stretched across one of the loungers beside the pool with her legs folded beneath a light blanket, the sketchbook balanced against one thigh and her head bent over the page. Only the small lamps along the garden wall and the pale underwater lights illuminated her properly, turning the surface of the pool into shifting blue reflections across her bare arms. A glass sat on the paving beside her. From inside the house, Harry couldn’t see what was in it, only the condensation on the outside and the slow movement of her hand whenever she reached down for it without taking her eyes off the sketch.

He stopped in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and watched her for longer than he should have. Not because she was doing anything remarkable. That was precisely why the sight held him. Sadie had always looked most like herself when she forgot she was being observed. She moved differently then. Less carefully.

The line between her brows deepened as she concentrated, and every few minutes she tilted the sketchbook away from herself to inspect whatever she had drawn before returning to it with quiet dissatisfaction. Her hair was loosely clipped at the back of her head, several strands escaping around her face, and one bare foot moved absently beneath the blanket in time with the tune she was humming.

Harry recognised the melody after several seconds. An old song she used to play while working late, usually loud enough that he could hear it from another room but soft enough that she could pretend she wasn’t trying to draw his attention. He remembered walking into the kitchen years ago and finding her hunched over a laptop, a pencil held between her teeth, humming the same tune while redesigning a client’s entire campaign at midnight because she had decided the original idea was “technically fine but offensive to my talent.” He had laughed until she threw a rubber at him. Later, when she finally finished, she had climbed into bed still talking about colour palettes and fallen asleep halfway through a sentence with one hand resting against his chest.

The memory arrived without permission and without the usual immediate punishment. For once, Harry let it.

He crossed to the wine fridge and took out a bottle already open from the previous evening, pouring himself a small glass before sliding the door aside. Warm evening air moved into the house, carrying the faint smell of chlorine and something floral from the hedges along the back wall. Sadie’s humming became clearer as he stepped outside, though she didn’t notice him until his bare feet reached the paving near her lounger.

She looked up quickly, the pencil stopping against the page. “Oh. Hi.”

“Hi.”

Her gaze dropped towards the wine in his hand, then to her own glass of water on the floor. Harry followed it and smiled faintly as he lowered himself onto the lounger beside hers. “You’ve got water. I’ve apparently decided jet lag is best treated with alcohol.”

Something uncertain moved across her face. “I’m trying not to drink as much.”

Harry’s smile faded slightly, not because the answer concerned him but because Sadie had delivered it with the tone of someone admitting to a much larger thing than he had asked. She looked at her glass again before adding, “At all, really. I haven’t completely stopped. I don’t know whether that’s what I’m meant to do yet, but I’m trying.” She hesitated, and then, as though the openness had escaped too quickly, she gave a small, embarrassed shake of her head. “Sorry. That was probably more information than you wanted when you were just making a comment about drinks.”

“No.” Harry settled back against the lounger, keeping the glass loosely in one hand. “I didn’t mean anything by it, but it isn’t too much information.” He watched her thumb move over the wooden pencil. “Why are you cutting back?”

Sadie’s eyes stayed on the sketchbook for a while, though she had stopped drawing entirely. The garden gave them enough darkness to avoid the peculiar intensity of sitting opposite each other in a bright room, and Harry wondered whether that was what allowed her to answer without immediately retreating into something easier.

“I think I was using it in ways I didn’t want to admit,” she said eventually. “Drinking to forget things, but also drinking because I didn’t know how else to sit with them. Sometimes it was just wine with dinner, obviously. I’m not trying to rewrite every glass I’ve ever had into some enormous warning sign. But towards the end, before I told you, and then afterwards…” Her shoulders lifted slightly beneath the blanket. “It stopped being something I enjoyed and became something I reached for because I didn’t want to feel whatever was happening in my head. Which would probably be less worrying if I’d ever actually managed not to feel it. Mostly I just felt everything badly and with a headache.”

Harry looked down at his own wine. There had been nights in those first weeks when he knew Sadie had been drinking because her late messages became slightly more emotional before disappearing altogether the next morning. He had judged her for it then, privately and bitterly, thinking she had no right to dull the consequences of something he was forced to carry sober. Hearing her describe it now did not erase that resentment, but it shifted it enough for him to see the desperation beneath the habit.

“My therapist said using something to avoid a feeling doesn’t actually remove the feeling,” Sadie continued, then grimaced at herself almost immediately. “Which sounds incredibly obvious when you repeat it out loud. Apparently the brain enjoys learning the same basic lesson repeatedly and charging by the hour.”

Harry gave a quiet laugh. “Useful arrangement.”

“She said I needed to learn the difference between regulating myself and escaping myself.” Sadie’s mouth twisted slightly. “Sorry. Is this annoying?”

“What?”

“Being one of those people who keeps saying, ‘My therapist said.’”

Harry pretended to consider it. “A little.”

Her brows lifted.

He let her hold the concern for half a second before smiling. “I’m joking. It’s fine.”

“Annoying but fine?”

“Exactly.”

The smile that reached her face was cautious but genuine, and Harry felt something ease between them. It was not the first time they had spoken outside therapy now, but it was the first conversation that seemed to begin without either of them standing near a door, watching a clock or waiting for Jesse to need something. The night around them felt unhurried. Even the pool seemed to hold the silence differently, absorbing it rather than making it feel like a failure.

“How is it going?” he asked. “Your therapy.”

Sadie looked down at the open page again, though Harry could see she was no longer avoiding him so much as searching for language precise enough to fit. “It’s hard. Really hard. I come out feeling like I’ve been hit by something, and then I spend the next day wondering whether I exaggerated everything or said it wrong or gave her a version of myself that isn’t accurate.” She rested the pencil in the centre fold of the book. “We’re talking about things I’ve never spoken about before. Not to Mum. Not to you. Some of it I don’t think I even understood as something worth talking about until she asked a question and I realised I’d built half my personality around avoiding the answer.”

Harry listened without asking what those things were. Curiosity moved through him, of course, accompanied by the smaller, more painful thought that there were still entire rooms inside Sadie he had never been invited into. But he also understood that asking might turn her therapy into another source of information he believed he was owed, and he did not want to do that. Not tonight.

“Is it helping?”

“I think so.” She sighed and drew the blanket slightly higher over her legs. “It’s awful, and I hate it, but it’s good.”

Harry nodded with exaggerated seriousness. “Good. Not the awful part. The good part.”

A small giggle escaped her before she could catch it. “Thank you for clarifying.”

“I thought it was important.”

“It was. I nearly misunderstood you completely.”

The joke was light, but it brushed gently against something true enough that both of them felt it. Rather than allowing the moment to harden, Harry lifted his glass and took a sip, glancing towards the sketchbook. “What are you drawing?”

Sadie followed his gaze and turned the book slightly towards herself as though she had forgotten he could see it. “Nothing, really.”

“You’ve been out here for at least an hour.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s anything good.”

“I didn’t ask whether it was good.”

She looked at him then, perhaps recognising the old argument. Harry had spent years trying to convince her that not everything needed to become work simply because she was talented enough to make it useful. She had spent the same years insisting that showing someone an unfinished sketch was the visual equivalent of being caught halfway through changing clothes.

After a moment she relented, angling the book enough that he could see several loose portraits spread across both pages. They were unfinished and overlapping, features emerging from light pencil marks before dissolving into the next face. Anne’s profile was there near one corner, recognisable by the shape of her smile. Jesse appeared several times: asleep on the aircraft, looking over his shoulder in the new kitchen, apparently mid-sentence with his mouth open and one hand raised. Harry could see part of Jeff’s face, Paddy’s eyes, Tommy’s nose and, near the edge of the page, the beginning of something that might have been him.

“Faces,” Sadie said. “Family faces, mostly. Or people who feel like family. I don’t know. I was just drawing whoever came into my head.”

Harry looked at the pages for another moment. There were no captions, no explanation of why some faces had been finished more carefully than others, but the arrangement felt intimate in a way he could not name. Sadie had always made sense of people by drawing them. She noticed the tilt of a mouth before she understood why someone looked sad, the shape of tension around their eyes before they admitted they were worried. He wondered what she saw when she drew him now. Whether the version on the page looked angry, tired, still in love or all three.

Sadie started saying something about Jesse’s expression in one of the sketches, explaining that he had been furious because Anne had stuck a hat on the wrong animal, but Harry barely heard the end of it. The apology had been sitting inside him since London, carried through packing, the flight and the strange first day in the house, waiting for a moment that did not feel manufactured. This, he realised, was probably as close as he was going to get.

“I’m sorry for how it came across.”

Sadie stopped speaking and looked at him in confusion. Her fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the sketchbook. “The wine thing? It really is fine, Harry. I didn't think you were—”

“No.” He interrupted again. “I mean therapy.”

The confusion left her face slowly, replaced by an immediate discomfort she tried to hide by looking down at the page. Harry watched her close the sketchbook with unnecessary care, folding the cover over the portraits as though the conversation required her to put every more vulnerable part of herself away first.

“Oh.” She tucked the pencil into the elastic. “You don’t need to apologise.”

“I think I do.”

“You didn’t say anything wrong.”

“That isn’t what I mean.”

Sadie shifted beneath the blanket, eyes fixed on her hands now. “I don’t know what I expected you to say. I asked you something enormous at the end of a really difficult session. You were honest. That’s what we’re meant to be doing.”

Harry let out a slow breath. He had replayed the moment enough times to know every line of her face as the answer reached her, the way she had tried to remain composed for Doctor Bennett while something visibly collapsed behind her eyes. “I’m not apologising for not having an answer. I still don’t have one. I’m apologising because I know how it sounded.”

Her gaze lifted cautiously.

“‘I don’t know’ isn’t ‘no’,” he said. “I need you to understand that.”

Sadie remained very still. The words did not immediately comfort her; Harry could see that. If anything, they seemed to open a space she had spent the last few days trying to close, and she looked unsure whether stepping into it would be brave or foolish.

“I do understand,” she said quietly.

“Do you?”

“I think so.” Harry waited. Sadie pressed her lips together, then looked out across the pool. “I don’t really know what else I’m meant to say.”

The answer frustrated him slightly, not because it was inadequate but because it sounded like the beginning of another retreat. “Just ‘okay’?”

She glanced back. “What would you like me to say?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

A breath of humour moved through her expression despite the tension. “That feels unfair considering the entire conversation is about you not knowing.”

Harry almost smiled, and the near-laughter softened the edge enough for Sadie to continue. She drew one knee closer beneath the blanket, wrapping both hands around it. “It isn’t that I heard ‘no’. Not exactly. I know you well enough to know you would have said no if that was what you meant.” She paused, the next admission requiring more care. “It just felt like rejection.”

Harry’s chest tightened.

“I had spent the whole day at the Lido remembering what I wanted,” she said. “Not what I deserved or what was realistic or what would make things easiest for Jesse. Just what I wanted. And then in therapy I finally said it out loud, which felt terrifying and also strangely simple once I did. I wanted you. I wanted our marriage. I wanted to fight for it.” She gave a small, embarrassed shrug. “I think some part of me wanted you to say, ‘Then fight.’ Not that everything was fixed, or that you forgave me, or even that you knew where it was going. I just wanted to know you wanted me to try.”

Harry looked down at the wine in his hand, turning the stem slowly between his fingers. “That isn’t unrealistic.”

“It might be.”

“It isn’t.”

“Harry, you’re allowed not to want anything from me.”

“I know.”

Sadie waited, and Harry understood that agreement alone would not be enough. If he wanted them to speak outside therapy, he could not keep offering half-sentences and expecting her to build the rest from instinct. That was part of what had broken them before. Assumptions dressed as understanding.

“I do want you to try,” he said.

Her face changed, though she did not allow hope to arrive as openly as it had at the Lido. She had become wary of it now, protecting herself from every possible interpretation even while wanting desperately to believe the simplest one.

“I do,” Harry repeated. “I think.”

Sadie’s eyes dropped, and he shook his head before she could take the qualification as a withdrawal. “The ‘I think’ isn’t about whether I want you to care. Or whether I want you to show up. I do. It’s about what happens inside me when you do.”

She looked back at him.

Harry rested his glass on the paving beside the lounger, freeing both hands because holding anything suddenly felt distracting. “Those moments you talked about at the pool, where you forgot for a second and everything felt like before—I have them too. More than I’ve admitted.” He leaned forwards, forearms resting against his knees, his voice quieter now that the thing itself had finally become clear enough to say. “Sometimes I’m with you and Jesse, and it feels so normal that my body relaxes before my brain remembers it isn’t supposed to. I laugh. I look at you. I want to tell you something. Then I remember what happened and I get angry with myself for having forgotten.”

Sadie’s face tightened with pain.

“I tell myself I’m making it smaller by enjoying anything with you,” Harry continued. “Like if I’m not furious every second, it means I didn’t understand what you did. Or it means I’m weak. Or stupid. Then there are other times where I remember and I don’t punish myself for it. I just let the moment happen, and that frightens me too because I don’t know what it means.”

He rubbed both hands together, searching for language that did not make him sound more certain than he was. “I miss my wife. I do, Sadie. I miss you so much sometimes it feels physical. I miss talking to you without thinking about every word first. I miss you being in a room and not wondering whether looking at you is going to hurt. I miss knowing what our life is.”

Sadie looked down, and Harry watched a tear land soundlessly against the back of her hand.

“But I also don’t trust you,” he said, the truth arriving without anger and therefore cutting more cleanly. “Not completely. And I don’t know how both things fit together. I don’t know how I can want you this much and still feel afraid of being near you. I don’t know why it feels like I’m being pulled apart, or what exactly is doing the pulling.”

The garden fell quiet around them. Somewhere beyond the wall, a car moved slowly along the road before fading into the distance. Sadie wiped beneath one eye with the heel of her hand and gave a broken little laugh as she glanced towards her water.

“Could use a drink right about now.”

Harry’s mouth curved despite the ache in his chest. “Convenient timing to stop.”

“Terrible, honestly.”

The small joke gave her enough air to breathe, though when she spoke again the apology returned with all the weariness of something she had repeated so often it no longer felt large enough. “I’m sorry. I know that’s almost useless now. I say it constantly, and I worry it just sounds like a reflex, but I do mean it. I’m sorry you feel torn apart because of me. I’m sorry I don’t know how to fix it or make it easier for you.”

Harry looked at her for a long moment. “I don’t know how to fix it either.”

She nodded, accepting the truth without trying to make it harsher than it was.

“And this conversation has ended in quite a depressing place,” he added, glancing towards the pool before looking back at her, “but I’ve liked it. Is that weird?”

A tired smile moved slowly across her face. “No.”

“It feels weird.”

“It’s agonising,” she said, drawing the blanket closer around herself. “But no. I’ve liked it too.”

Harry waited.

Sadie looked at him then, properly and without immediately retreating from what her face might reveal. “I miss you too.”

The words did not fix anything. They did not close the distance between the loungers, return them to the same bedroom or make the next therapy session less frightening. They simply remained there in the warm Los Angeles night, honest and insufficient and more intimate than anything they had managed in months.

For now, neither of them asked them to become more.

──────────────

Three days before the first Los Angeles show, Harry realised he was excited. Not relieved, not merely capable, not moving through rehearsal with the grim professionalism he had relied on during the London residency while the rest of his life splintered quietly backstage. Excited.

The feeling had caught him off guard during the second rehearsal, somewhere between the band settling into the middle of the set and the production team finally getting a lighting transition exactly right. He had looked out across rows of empty seats and felt the familiar pull in his chest, the old anticipation of imagining those spaces filled, and for once the thought had not been immediately followed by dread.

Wembley had returned something to him, even if the shows themselves had often felt like a performance layered over another performance. His body remembered the work now. The timing, the movement, the little decisions that could only be made once the music was loud enough to become physical. He knew what he was doing, and there was comfort in that. The stage remained one of the few places where uncertainty could be rehearsed until it looked like instinct.

Jesse had settled into Los Angeles with far less difficulty than any of them had expected. He accepted the new house as though it had been waiting specifically for him, became fiercely attached to the pool and had already decided that breakfast should be eaten outside because “the sun likes toast.” He slept through most nights after the first two, stopped asking when they were going home and began referring to the guest room as Mummy’s room with the same easy certainty he used for Daddy’s room across the landing. Every sign that he felt secure should have comforted Sadie. Instead, each one seemed to press gently against the most painful truth of the trip: Jesse was settled because neither parent was disappearing at the end of the day.

The routine had become dangerously easy. Harry left for rehearsal and returned before dinner. Sadie worked from the shaded table outside while Jesse played nearby or followed Anne around the garden. They ate together more often than not, usually because their son made the decision for them by climbing into the chair between theirs and refusing to accept any other arrangement. At night, one of them handled bath time while the other tidied the aftermath of a three-year-old moving through a rented version of family life. Sometimes Harry and Sadie spoke after Jesse went to sleep. Sometimes they didn’t. But even on the quieter evenings there was an awareness of each other that felt less hostile than it had in London, the distance between them no longer reinforced by separate addresses and carefully timed handovers.

Sadie had spent much of the last three days trying not to interpret any of it. That was becoming harder.

Harry’s words beside the pool on their second night remained with her in ways she had not anticipated. I miss my wife. I miss you so much sometimes it feels physical. It should have soothed something. Instead it had given her another sentence to carry alongside the ones that hurt. He wanted to be near her and was afraid of being near her. He missed her and did not trust her. There were moments when he forgot what she had done, followed by moments when he punished himself for forgetting, and Sadie had begun to understand that any future they might have would be built inside that contradiction rather than after it disappeared. She did not know whether she was strong enough to live there. She knew, with a certainty that frightened her, that she wanted to try.

They were in the pool when the afternoon changed. Harry had returned from rehearsal earlier than expected and found Jesse standing at the glass doors wearing his floaties over a T-shirt. Within twenty minutes all three of them were in the water, the sun still high enough to warm the paving while shadows from the palms stretched slowly across the garden. Anne sat beneath an umbrella with a book open in her lap, occasionally looking up to make sure Jesse had not managed to remove one of his floaties again, though she seemed content to let Harry and Sadie absorb most of his energy.

Sadie had been standing chest-deep near the shallow end while Jesse attempted to climb onto a large inflatable crocodile that refused to remain still beneath him. Harry held it steady with one hand and kept the other near Jesse’s waist, laughing each time their son slipped sideways and insisted the crocodile had “moved naughty.” It was an ordinary scene, chaotic in the mild, repetitive way parenting often was, and Sadie had once again found herself watching Harry more closely than she meant to.

He looked happy. Not stage happy, not the bright, generous version of himself built to carry an arena, but relaxed in the way she remembered from holidays before every trip became connected to work. His hair was pushed back from his face and already beginning to curl as it dried. Water ran along his shoulders each time he lifted Jesse back onto the inflatable, and Sadie had to look away more than once because apparently betrayal, separation and months of emotional collapse had done absolutely nothing to make her husband less attractive. It felt profoundly unfair.

She wanted the physical part of missing him to be the simplest thing, something shame could extinguish easily, but her body still recognised him without hesitation. Every familiar line, every tattoo, the easy strength of his arms around their son—none of it understood that she no longer had the right to reach for him.

“Hey.” Harry’s voice pulled her back. She looked up and found him watching her over Jesse’s head, concern replacing the smile that had been there moments earlier. “You okay?”

Sadie realised she had stopped responding entirely, standing in the same patch of water while her thoughts carried her somewhere far less manageable. She summoned a smile before he could study her too closely. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired.”

It was not technically a lie. Her body still had not fully accepted the time difference, and the emotional work of existing under the same roof as Harry was exhausting in ways sleep could not correct. Even so, his expression suggested he heard the familiar evasion inside it. He did not press, perhaps because Jesse chose that moment to abandon the crocodile and paddle determinedly between them.

“Mummy,” he said, the seriousness in his little face entirely disproportionate to the situation. “I gotta tell you something.”

Sadie lowered herself slightly until they were closer to eye level, thankful for the interruption and immediately afraid of it in the way parents often were when toddlers announced information with that much gravity. “Okay, Jess. I’m listening.”

Jesse looked briefly towards Harry, checking that he remained close enough to be included, then turned back to Sadie. Water gathered along his eyelashes, and one floatie had twisted slightly so the printed shark faced backwards. “I like you and Daddy.”

Sadie smiled automatically. “We like you too.”

“No.” Jesse frowned, dissatisfied with how badly she had understood. “I like you and Daddy here.”

The smile remained on her mouth, though she could feel it becoming difficult to hold.

Jesse gestured vaguely towards the house, one little hand sending water across his own face. “We have one house here.”

Everything inside Sadie seemed to go quiet at once. It was such a simple sentence, assembled with the limited language of a child who did not know words like separation, custody or betrayal, and yet he had managed to place the entire shape of their fractured family into it. In London, Mummy had one house and Daddy had another. Bags moved between them. Bunny was occasionally left in the wrong bedroom. Bedtime belonged to whichever parent the calendar had selected. Here, there was one kitchen, one staircase and both voices available whenever he called.

Sadie looked towards Harry. He had gone very still, one hand remaining beneath Jesse’s arm to keep him balanced while something broke openly across his face. Harry had become skilled at containing pain around their son, but she saw the tightening of his mouth and the way his gaze dropped briefly towards the water before finding hers again. For one awful second they understood each other perfectly. Neither of them had a safe answer. They could not promise Jesse one house when they did not know whether their marriage would survive. They could not explain that the reason he wanted this simplicity was because his mother had destroyed it. Sadie’s mind supplied the words with vicious clarity anyway: Sorry, sweetheart. Mummy slept with somebody else because she was lonely and selfish and too cowardly to speak before she acted, and now you get to carry the consequences in a backpack between two homes.

Her stomach turned. Jesse remained expectant.

Harry recovered first, though his voice came out softer than usual. “You like having everyone together?”

Jesse nodded enthusiastically, relieved that Daddy had finally translated the obvious. “Yeah. Mummy here. Daddy here. Nanny Anne here. Pool here.”

Anne looked up from her book at the mention of her name, though she was too far away to have heard the rest.

Harry gave a faint smile and reached to straighten Jesse’s floatie. “That’s a lot of good things.”

“Yeah. Lots of good things,” Jesse confirmed.

Sadie had to look away. Before either of them could find anything else to offer, the glass door slid open hard enough to strike its stopper.

Jeff stepped into the garden with his phone pressed against one ear, moving quickly and wearing the particular expression Harry had learnt to associate with problems that had already grown too large to be solved quietly. His free hand rested against his hip, then moved towards his forehead as he listened to whoever was speaking on the other end. “Yeah,” he said, voice clipped. “I’m with him now. I’m about to tell him. Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll call you back.”

Harry’s entire posture changed. The ease disappeared from him before Jeff had even ended the call. He shifted Jesse closer to Sadie instinctively, eyes narrowing as he watched his manager cross the paving. “What’s happened?”

Jeff pulled the phone away and ended the call, then looked at the three of them in the pool. His gaze lingered briefly on Jesse before moving to Sadie, and whatever he saw seemed to make the next words harder.

“H, I need to speak to you.”

Harry glanced towards Anne, who had already placed her book aside and was watching with alert concern. “Okay. Go ahead.”

Jeff shook his head. “Not here.”

“Jeff.”

“This isn’t a pool conversation.” His voice remained controlled, but the strain beneath it was obvious now. “And actually, Sadie may need to hear it too.”

Sadie felt the first cold movement of dread before she understood why.

Harry lifted Jesse gently towards the edge, where Anne was already approaching with a towel. “Mum, can you take him for a minute?”

Anne accepted him without asking questions, wrapping the towel around his shoulders while Jesse immediately protested that he was not finished swimming. Sadie climbed from the pool behind Harry, water running down her legs and making the air feel unexpectedly cool against her skin. She reached for the first towel she found and wrapped it around herself without drying properly, following the two men through the glass doors with the uneasy sense that she was stepping out of one life and into another. The kitchen felt overly bright after the sun.

Harry pulled a white shirt from the back of a chair and dragged it over his wet shoulders without fastening it, patches of water spreading immediately across the fabric. Sadie remained near the island with the towel gathered tightly beneath her arms, drops collecting beneath her feet on the stone floor. Outside, Jesse’s voice rose and fell as Anne attempted to redirect him towards snacks, the sound strangely distant despite the glass separating them by only a few metres.

Jeff stood opposite them and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose. “An article broke about twenty minutes ago.”

Harry frowned. “About what?”

Jeff looked at Sadie again. The dread became weight.

“The marriage.” Neither of them spoke. “And infidelity,” he added.

For a fraction of a second, the words did not make sense. Sadie heard them individually but could not connect them to herself, as though Jeff had begun speaking in a language she recognised only in pieces.

Harry understood immediately.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” His voice hit the kitchen hard enough that Sadie flinched.

Jeff reached for his phone. “A site published a story claiming you’ve separated because of an affair. It’s already being aggregated, and the phrasing suggests they have more than general speculation.”

“Let me see it.”

“H—”

“Now, Jeff!”

The phone was in Harry’s hand before Jeff had fully unlocked it. Sadie watched his eyes move across the screen, his expression changing with each line. Anger appeared first, quick and clean, then something darker as he scrolled.

“What does it say?” she asked, though her voice sounded as if it came from the opposite side of the room.

Harry did not answer.

Jeff did. “The headline is: Inside Harry Styles’ Marriage Crisis: Infidelity, Separate Homes and a Family on the Brink.”

Sadie stopped breathing.

Jeff continued speaking, but the words began to blur almost immediately. The piece claimed sources close to the couple had confirmed they were living separately. It referred to therapy, though not by name. It mentioned the London residency, Sadie leaving shows early, changes to family travel and, most damningly, an “incident involving another man” that had destabilised the marriage. The language was careful enough to avoid stating details as established fact but specific enough to make denial look suspicious.

Harry swore under his breath, then louder. “Who fucking knows about therapy?”

“We’re narrowing it down,” Jeff said. “There are two likely avenues. Somebody connected to the clinic or somebody who has access through one of the teams around the residency. The PR team are already working through it, legal are looking at what can be challenged, and we’ve got a call in fifteen minutes to decide whether we say nothing, deny the details or put out something limited.”

“Somebody connected to the clinic?” Harry’s anger sharpened. “Are you saying our therapist leaked it?”

“I’m saying we don’t know anything yet.”

“This says she cheated on me.”

“I know.”

“It says our family is on the fucking brink like it’s a television programme.”

“I know, H.”

Sadie stood listening while the room receded. The air-conditioning seemed suddenly too loud. Then too quiet. Jeff’s voice became muffled beneath a rushing sound that filled both ears, and Harry’s anger moved around her without reaching her properly. She could see his mouth forming words, see the tendons in his neck tighten as he demanded names and timelines, but she heard only fragments: source, containment, photographers, statement. Her body remained rigid beside the island while her thoughts froze around the headline.

Infidelity. Marriage crisis. Family on the brink.

The secret no longer belonged to the three people in Doctorr Bennett’s office. It belonged to strangers now. It would be discussed over breakfast, rewritten for social media, dissected by people who had never met them and would still decide what kind of woman she was. They would look at photographs of her with Jesse and know. They would look at Harry onstage and know. They would wonder who the man was, how far it went, whether Harry had been humiliated, whether Sadie had ever loved him.

She began to sweat. Not ordinary heat. Something cold and damp moved across her skin beneath the towel while her heart accelerated so quickly it seemed to lose rhythm. She tried to draw in a breath and found it stopped halfway, her lungs refusing to expand past an invisible boundary. The kitchen tipped slightly at the edges.

Nobody noticed when her feet moved. Or perhaps Harry did, because she heard her name behind her as she crossed the room, though it came through the same underwater distortion as everything else.

“Sadie?”

She kept walking. The hallway seemed longer than it had that morning. She knew she was heading towards the bedroom because her body had chosen it, though she had no conscious plan beyond getting away from the screen, the headline and Jeff’s voice explaining how quickly private devastation could become public entertainment.

“Sadie, where are you going?”

Harry was behind her now. She could hear his wet feet against the floor.

“Sadie?”

Her hand struck the bedroom door rather than reaching for the handle properly. She pushed it open and made it several steps inside before the room narrowed around her. Her chest moved too quickly, each breath shallow and useless. She bent forwards with both hands braced against her knees, the towel slipping slightly from one shoulder.

Was this how people died?

The thought arrived with complete seriousness.

Her heart was too fast. Her fingers tingled. The edges of her vision darkened and brightened in alternating waves, and she became aware of tears on her face without remembering when she had started crying. She tried to inhale again and made a sound that frightened her, a small broken gasp that seemed to confirm there was no air left anywhere.

Harry appeared in front of her. At first she saw only parts of him. Wet shirt. Bare legs. His hands hovering near her arms without touching. His mouth moving.

“Sadie, breathe.”

She shook her head.

“I need you to breathe with me.”

She could not. The rushing in her ears grew louder.

Harry lowered himself slightly, trying to bring his face into her line of sight. “Look at me.”

“I can’t breathe.” The sentence tore out of her and seemed to break something open. Her chest jerked again.

The pressure in her ears shifted abruptly, like surfacing too quickly from deep water, and Harry’s voice returned all at once.

“You can. You are breathing. It feels like you can’t, but you are.” He spoke slowly, firmly, every word shaped for her rather than at her. “Look at me, Sadie. Come on. Eyes here.”

She tried, but her gaze kept slipping past him. Harry finally placed both hands on her shoulders.

The contact was steady and unavoidable. One hand moved from her shoulder to the side of her face, lifting her chin gently until she had no choice but to meet his eyes. “That’s it. Stay with me. Breathe in while I do.”

He exaggerated the breath, drawing it slowly through his nose. Sadie attempted to copy him and failed, the inhale breaking into several smaller gasps.

“That’s alright. Again.”

He did not let go.

“Slowly. You’re safe. Jesse’s outside with Mum. Jeff’s handling the article. Nothing is happening to you in this room.”

She shook her head, tears moving freely now.

“It’s everywhere, Harry.”

“I know.”

“Everyone knows.”

“They know what somebody wrote. They don’t know us.”

Another breath.

“Again, Sadie.”

She followed him this time, not successfully but more deeply than before.

“Good. Hold it for a second. Now out.”

Minutes passed without shape. Harry remained in front of her, breathing deliberately until her body began to match him despite itself. Every time panic surged again, he brought her back to the same instruction.

Look at him. In. Hold. Out.

The room slowly widened. Her fingers stopped tingling. The pounding in her chest remained, but it no longer felt fatal.

At some point she ended up sitting on the edge of the bed with Harry crouched in front of her, both his hands wrapped around hers. His shirt had dried unevenly, the fabric clinging to one shoulder and hanging open at his chest. Sadie focused on that because it was easier than the article, easier than imagining the headline replicated across hundreds of screens.

“That’s good,” Harry murmured when her breathing finally steadied. “So good. Just keep going like that.”

Sadie closed her eyes briefly, exhausted in a way that felt physical and absolute. When she opened them again, Harry was still there, watching her with anger, fear and something painfully tender arranged across the same face.

Her throat hurt when she spoke, “Just when it was starting to feel like we might find our way back.”

Harry’s grip tightened around her hands. Sadie looked at him, the full horror of the timing settling into her now that panic no longer obscured it.

“I’ve ruined us all over again.”

──────────────

Author's Note:

Hi Everyone!

Firstly, I'm so sorry for disappearing for a little while, and I'm especially sorry if I worried anyone. Life has been a bit overwhelming recently, and alongside that I've been navigating some mental health struggles, so I just needed to take a bit of a step back and look after myself.

I also just wanted to say thank you. Every message, comment and check-in has meant so much to me, even if I haven't had the energy to reply yet. I've read them all, and they've genuinely made some difficult days a little easier. I'll be catching up on replies this weekend, and as a little thank you, I hope you enjoyed the new chapter of Strawberry Wine.