THAT NIGHT IN HIS NEW bedroom, Alex lies staring at the ceiling for far too long. This is a moment, and maybe after all the other moments he’s had recently, this one should feel less by comparison. It doesn’t.
He pulls out his phone to reread the text from Carly, then scrolls to Paul’s name in his contacts. Now that there’s no reason he shouldn’t call and nothing stopping him from getting in his car and driving to Paul’s house, doing any of that feels impossible.
The idea of being with Paul again had been lovely as a fantasy and an abstraction. Here, in unfamiliar surroundings in a familiar place it’s too easy to remember all the things that had gone wrong.
But with Gemma down in the loft instead on the other side of the wall Alex is lonely in the vast expanse of his new house. He’s nev
