Chapter 109

Lila’s POV

I was having one of those quiet evenings that had begun to feel like a strange kind of normal. The house was calm, wrapped in the low hum of silence that only small towns seemed to carry at night. I had curled up on the couch with a blanket draped over my legs, a steaming mug of tea in my hand. The citrus lavender blend was warm and familiar, the kind of comfort that smoothed over frayed edges.

I wasn’t thinking about much. Or maybe I was thinking about too much all at once, Daniel stopping by earlier in the week, Ethan’s innocent questions about mothers, my parents’ gentle reassurances. My life had become a jumble of contradictions. Quiet and safe here, but always haunted by echoes of New York, of everything I left behind.

Then my phone lit up as a call came in.

The name that flashed across the screen stopped my breath cold.

Drew.

For a second, I thought my eyes were tricking me. I even blinked, once, twice, as though the letters might rearrange into someone else’s name. But they didn’t. His name glowed against the dim light of the room, searing into me like fire.

My heart pounded so hard it hurt. My first instinct was disbelief, why would he call me now? After everything? After pushing me away so completely?

I stared at the phone as it buzzed in my hand, the sound loud and insistent in the quiet. Suspicion rose sharp in my chest. Was this a mistake? Did he dial me by accident? Or was this some cruel twist, another way to shatter me after I had just begun to piece myself together?

My thumb hovered over the green button. For a moment, I nearly let it ring out.

But then… curiosity won. Or maybe it wasn’t curiosity. Maybe it was the part of me that hadn’t stopped aching for him, no matter how many times I told myself that nothing existed between the both of us. The part that still carried his face in my dreams, the part that still felt his absence like a missing limb.

With a shaky breath, I pressed accept.

“Hello?” My voice was quiet, cautious.

For a heartbeat, there was only silence. The silence stretched and I asked again, “Drew…Is that you?”

Finally he responded.

“Lila…” His voice cracked, rough and raw in a way I had never heard before. It wasn’t the sharp, controlled tone he used in boardrooms. It wasn’t the cold, clipped voice he used the last time we spoke. This was different. Broken.

Something inside me shifted.

“I… I miss you,” he said. The words tumbled out, slurred at the edges, weighed down by something heavy. He had been drinking and I could tell it from his voice. But underneath the haze, there was truth. Vulnerability. His walls had slipped, and what poured out was unguarded, unfiltered.

My grip on the phone tightened until my knuckles ached. My chest heaved with a breath I couldn’t quite release.

Part of me wanted to believe it. God, I wanted to. Those three words were everything I had longed to hear in the weeks since he turned away from me, since he made me feel like nothing more than a mistake. They pierced straight through the layers I had built to protect myself, layers I thought were solid.

But another part of me recoiled. He was drunk. His voice gave it away. What if this wasn’t real? What if tomorrow he woke up and forgot he ever said it or worse, regretted it?

“Drew…” My voice broke on his name.

He kept talking, his words spilling like water through a cracked dam. Apologies tangled with confessions, admissions of how lost he felt, how much he thought of me, how empty everything seemed without me in it.

I pressed the phone closer to my ear, every muscle in my body straining toward his voice even as my heart screamed at me to be careful.

Tears burned my eyes, hot and relentless. My free hand drifted instinctively to my stomach, to the swell beneath my cardigan. Our child. The one he didn’t trust me enough to believe in at first. The one I was now carrying alone.

I wanted to tell him. I wanted to say I missed him too. That every night since I left, I had thought about him, wondered if he thought about me. But the words stuck in my throat.

Because the truth was, I didn’t know if I could trust him.

Not yet.

Not after the way he looked at me that night in the hospital, his eyes sharp with suspicion, his voice laced with betrayal. Not after he compared me to Kimberley, the ghost that haunted both of us in different ways. His mistrust had cut deeper than Max’s threats, because Drew’s mistrust had come from someone I thought, just for a moment might be my safe place.

“I miss you Lila” His voice cracked again, softer now, almost like a plea.

My heart shattered into pieces I didn’t know how to hold together.

I closed my eyes, the tears spilling freely down my cheeks as I listened to him. His breathing grew slower, heavier, his words fading into murmurs. He was slipping, drifting, the alcohol pulling him under.

“Drew?” I whispered, desperate for him to stay awake, desperate for answers, desperate for anything but this hollow ache.

But he didn’t answer. The only sound on the line was his steady, uneven breathing. He had fallen asleep.

I stayed frozen, the phone pressed to my ear long after I realized he was gone from the conversation. My tears stained the blanket on my lap, silent sobs shaking through me.

He missed me. He said it. But he was drunk.

Did it count? Did it mean anything? Or was it just the alcohol speaking for him, loosening words he didn’t truly mean?

I didn’t know.

After what felt like forever, I finally lowered the phone. My thumb hovered over the screen before I ended the call, the silence of the house rushing back in like a wave.

The tea on the table had gone cold. The clock ticked softly in the corner. Outside, crickets sang their steady chorus. Everything was the same as before.

But I wasn’t.

I sank back against the couch, my body trembling, my heart a battlefield. One part of me wanted to call him back, to demand clarity, to cling to the hope his words had ignited. Another part of me wanted to throw the phone across the room, to harden myself again before he had the chance to hurt me twice.

I pressed my hand tighter against my stomach, whispering to the child who would never understand the war raging in my chest. “What do I do?”

No answer came.

Only the echo of his voice, raw and broken, replaying in my mind.

“I miss you.”

The words haunted me, fragile and dangerous all at once.

And as I sat there in the silence of my parents’ living room, tears drying on my cheeks, I realized I was more torn than ever.

Now I couldn’t tell if running away had saved me or if it had cost me the one thing I still wanted.