All At Once

CHAPTER EIGHT

POV: Zara

Morning came too fast.

She heard Ryan before her eyes opened. His voice downstairs, easy and unhurried, talking to someone. A second voice answered and her stomach dropped before she was fully awake.

Damon.

The two of them. Downstairs. Together.

She lay completely still and stared at the ceiling and ran through every possible version of getting through this day without everything falling apart. She came up with nothing convincing.

She got up. Washed her face. Looked at herself in the mirror longer than was useful.

Her lips were slightly swollen. She pressed two fingers against them and then turned away from the mirror before she could think about why.

The kitchen was full in a way it hadn’t been all weekend.

Ryan at the island with coffee. Damon at the stove. Camille at the table scrolling her phone, legs crossed, reading glasses on, unbothered and beautiful and completely unaware.

Three people she was lying to simultaneously.

Zara walked in and smiled and it felt like wearing a coat three sizes too small.

“Morning.” Ryan looked up. Warm. Open. He patted the stool beside him.

She sat. Accepted the coffee he slid over. “Thanks.”

“Damon’s making breakfast,” he said. Like this was delightful. Like this was a fun little group holiday and not the specific version of hell she was currently living in.

“Great,” she said.

Damon didn’t turn around. “Eggs okay for everyone?”

“Perfect,” Camille said without looking up.

Ryan said yeah absolutely. Zara said nothing because she didn’t trust her voice around that particular word in that particular moment.

She watched Damon’s back. The set of his shoulders. The complete stillness in him that no one else would notice because no one else had spent the last three days learning the difference between his comfortable silences and his controlled ones.

This was controlled.

Completely, precisely controlled.

Camille put her phone down and looked at Zara with a smile that reached her eyes.

That was the thing about Camille. She was genuinely warm. Funny when she wanted to be. The kind of woman who remembered things about you from three conversations ago and asked follow up questions. Zara had always liked her.

That made this so much worse.

“How was your week before all this?” Camille asked. “You were saying something last time about a work thing.”

“Oh.” Zara wrapped both hands around her mug. “Yeah. My manager finally approved the project I’ve been pushing for. Six months of chasing.”

“That’s brilliant.” Genuinely pleased. “You must be relieved.”

“So relieved.”

Ryan put his hand over hers on the counter. Squeezed once.

Across the kitchen she heard Damon set a pan down.

She kept her eyes on Camille. Kept the smile steady. Kept breathing.

Eggs. Toast. Orange juice. The four of them around the kitchen table like a normal group of normal people having a normal Saturday morning.

Ryan talked about the drive up. The roads, the ice, a lorry he’d passed that had skidded into a ditch. Camille responded. Damon asked questions in the right places. Zara contributed sentences when there was space for them and spent the rest of the time cutting her toast into smaller and smaller pieces that she wasn’t eating.

“You’re quiet,” Ryan said. Low, just to her. Not accusatory. Concerned.

“Tired.” She met his eyes. “Didn’t sleep well.”

He nodded. Rubbed her back once, slow. “We’ll head home tonight, yeah? Get you in your own bed.”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “That sounds good.”

She felt Damon’s attention from across the table like a physical thing. Didn’t look.

Camille was watching her.

Just for a second. Something behind those warm eyes that was sharper than her expression suggested. Then she looked back at her plate and whatever Zara thought she’d seen was gone.

Or maybe it was never there.

Maybe she was just unravelling.

After breakfast Camille and Ryan drifted to the living room. Some football thing Ryan had put on. The easy comfortable drift of people who had nothing to hide.

Zara started on the dishes.

She heard him come in. Felt him before she heard him, which was becoming a problem.

He stopped beside her. Picked up a dish towel. Started drying what she washed.

Domestic. Ordinary. Devastating.

“You okay?” he said. Quiet. Eyes forward.

“Fine.”

“Zara.”

“I said fine, Damon.”

A pause. He dried a mug. Set it down. “Camille wants to stay another night.”

Her hands stilled in the water. “What?”

“She wants to make a weekend of it. Asked if Marcus would mind.” He kept his voice completely even. “I said I’d check.”

She turned the tap off. Stood there with her hands dripping. Another night. All four of them. Another night of performing, pretending, lying with her face while her body remembered everything from twelve hours ago.

“Great,” she said.

“I can tell her no.”

“Don’t.” She picked up the next plate. “It’s fine. Ryan said we’d go home tonight anyway.”

Something shifted in him beside her. Barely visible.

“Right,” he said. “Good.”

“Good.”

They finished the dishes in silence. His arm brushed hers twice reaching for the towel and both times she felt it move through her like current and both times she said absolutely nothing.

Marcus called at noon. Roads were clear, he was leaving in an hour, he’d be back by two and he was starving. He was loud and happy and completely Marcus and talking to him made Zara feel like the worst person alive.

“Love you,” she said before she hung up.

“Love you more, birthday girl.” He always called her that the week before. “Tell Damon he owes me for babysitting duty.”

She laughed. It sounded real. She was getting frighteningly good at that.

She found ten minutes alone at one o’clock. Stepped into the back garden in her coat, door pulled almost shut behind her, and typed to the unknown number.

“Who are you”.

This time the reply came in seconds.

“Someone who was there the night your brother’s best friend couldn’t stop watching you at that barbecue, Someone who’s been watching him watch you ever since”.

Her breath fogged in the cold air.

“What do you want”, she typed.

A pause. Longer this time.

Then… “I haven’t decided yet….. But last night was very interesting, Zara”.

The back of her neck went cold.

Last night.

They hadn’t just been watching from a distance.

They’d been close enough to know about last night.

She spun around. Looked at the house. Every window. The garden wall. The side gate that was slightly open and hadn’t been open before.

Nothing. Nobody.

Just the white garden and the cold and the sound of Ryan laughing at something on the TV inside.

Her phone buzzed one more time.

“Does he know you were crying after he left your room?”