Wrong Inbox, Right Heart

Chapter Five

Holly's POV

Saturday morning started the way all my Saturday mornings did. Liam woke at six fifteen with the urgency of a person who had many plans for the day and zero patience for anyone else's timeline.

"Mama." He was standing beside my bed, one hand on my shoulder, his face about four inches from mine. "Mama, the sun is awake."

"The sun can wait," I said into my pillow.

"The sun cannot wait, Mama. It's being very bright."

I opened one eye. He was wearing his pajamas with the dinosaurs on them and his hair was doing the thing in the morning where it went sideways, and his expression was one of absolute seriousness about the urgency of being awake right now.

"Fine," I said. "Fine. We're up."

We had pancakes. I burned the first one the way I always did. I always burned the first one and Liam always very solemnly accepted it because he understood it was a sacrifice and he was a gracious boy when it suited him. We watched twenty minutes of cartoons. I drank two cups of coffee and started to feel like a person again.

It was a good morning. The kind that reminded me why I was doing all the hard things.

I texted Marcel when Liam went down for his afternoon nap. I'd been thinking about his answer from the night before. I think about it. I haven't decided what I think about it. There was something in that I turned over and over. The honesty of it. He hadn't performed certainty or come back with something smooth. He'd just told me the truth about where he was, which was undecided, and somehow that was more intimate than anything confident would have been.

Do you have a Saturday? I typed. Like, a real one. Do you get days off?

His reply: Define real.

Days where you don't work.

Then no.

Marcel.

I work most Saturdays. Occasionally Sunday mornings. A pause, then: I'm aware this is a character flaw.

It's not a character flaw, it's just sad.

That's a distinction without much difference.

I smiled at my screen. He had this way of being dryly self aware that I found disproportionately charming. Like he'd already assessed the situation clearly and had made peace with the unflattering parts of the assessment.

What would you do, I typed, if you had a Saturday? A whole one. No work.

He took a while with this one. I folded the throw blanket on the couch and checked on Liam and came back to find he'd typed: Genuinely no idea. I'd probably work anyway.

That's a tragic answer.

What would you do with a full Saturday?

I thought about it properly. A Saturday where I didn't have a shift. Where Liam was cared for and the bills were paid and I had hours that were just mine. I hadn't had one of those in long enough that it took me a minute to even imagine the shape of it.

Sleep until eight, I typed. Eat a slow breakfast with no burned first pancake. Walk somewhere by water. Read a book outside if it's warm. End the night with wine and a film I've been meaning to watch for two years.

That sounds, he wrote, and then paused long enough that I watched the typing indicator flicker on and off, genuinely perfect.

Right?

I've had Saturdays in Monaco and Côte d'Azur and I'm not sure any of them had that quality.

I stopped. Reread that. Monaco. Côte d'Azur. Those weren't places you mentioned casually unless they were genuinely in your frame of reference. I'd been to Monaco once, in a travel documentary I'd watched while folding laundry.

I thought about asking. About who he was, actually, what he did, what the shape of his life looked like beyond I work too much. But something stopped me. The same thing that kept me from telling him too much about myself. This thing between us existed in a particular clean space and I wasn't ready to let the specifics of real life into it yet.

Where are you? I typed instead, keeping it loose.

My apartment. You?

Couch. Nap window before my son wakes up and the second half of Saturday begins.

Rest, he wrote. You sound like you need it.

I always need it.

I know, he said, and there was something in those two words that felt careful and warm and entirely too close to tender for a man who claimed to be cold.

Holly.

Yeah?

I'm glad you texted the wrong number.

I lay on my couch in the thin afternoon light, my son asleep down the hall, the bills still on the counter, the world still the same world it had been that morning, and I read those words and thought: I am too. I am so much more than I know how to say.

Get back to work, Marcel, I typed.

Already am, he said. Goodnight for whenever it comes.

Goodnight, I wrote. And for the first time in a long time, I rested.