Chapter Text
London, in late June, stretches the day out longer than it has any right to, the light lingering well into the evening as if reluctant to let go. It spills in through the tall windows of her lounge in a low, golden wash, catching on glass and polished wood, softening the edges of everything. From the outside, the property might pass for something warm and lived-in, cosy even. But inside, it is immaculate in a way that has nothing to do with cleanliness and everything to do with containment.
There are no photographs on the walls.
Not of friends, not of family, and not of the man she married either. The surfaces are curated down to the smallest detail; books stacked with deliberate care, notebooks arranged in neat, parallel lines on the long oak table that dominates the centre of the room, a single vase of peonies just beginning to open, their petals soft and pale and already threatening to bruise at the edges. It is a space designed to hold her without ever overwhelming her, a space where nothing exists that she has not explicitly allowed.
Taylor Swift sits cross-legged in a brown wingback chair, one hand wrapped loosely around a mug of tea that has long since gone cold, the other hovering over the open notebook in front of her. The page is half-filled, her handwriting slanting slightly where she'd begun to write faster than she could comfortably sustain, chasing something sharp and fleeting before it disappeared.
She hasn't lost it.
That had been the quiet, unspoken fear in the months after everything ended. That whatever part of her that had always turned chaos into something coherent, something beautiful, might have gone with it. That the wreckage might finally be too much, too unwieldy, too close to the bone to shape into anything stable.
But if anything, it's better than before. Or worse. It depends how you look at it.
The songs come quickly now, almost embarrassingly so, as if the act of losing an entire life, an entire version of herself, has stripped away whatever hesitation used to slow her down. There is no need to reach for metaphor when the truth sits so plainly in her chest, heavy and insistent and impossible to ignore. She writes in long stretches, hours folding into each other without her noticing, the world outside reduced to the gradual shift of light across the floor and the occasional distant drone of traffic drifting up from the street below.
It is, in a way that she will never admit out loud, easier.
Not the living. The living is harder, heavier, full of quiet absences that catch her off guard at the most inconvenient moments—the empty side of the bed she still hasn't quite adjusted to, the instinct to turn and say something only to remember there is no one there to hear it. But the work, the thing she has always understood best, slides into place with a kind of ruthless efficiency. There is comfort in that, even if it feels faintly perverse to recognise it.
The divorce had been... not unexpected, in the end. Quick, by most standards. Dragging its heels, by hers.
There had been no spectacular implosion, no singular moment she could point to and say, this is where everything changed. Instead, it had been a slow, almost imperceptible erosion, the kind that only becomes obvious once there is nothing left to stand on. Small incompatibilities calcifying into something harder to ignore. Two people who, on paper, made perfect sense discovering, in the private reality of a shared space and shared time and a shared life, that they did not know how to move around each other without causing damage.
She had stayed longer than she should have. She knows that now. Not out of love, exactly, though there had been enough of that at the beginning to justify the attempt. More out of a stubborn, almost defiant belief that if she had chosen this—if she had committed to it publicly, permanently—then she would see it through. That she would not add another failed narrative to the long list of stories already attached to her name.
But eventually, even she'd had to concede that some things cannot be written into coherence.
So she had left.
And, in a move that had surprised almost everyone except herself, she had come back here.
London had never really let her go. Not entirely. There had always been something about it. The anonymity it offered despite her visibility. The way it allowed her to exist in a slightly different register, quieter, less observed even when she was very much in the public eye. It was, inconveniently, also the place where too many things had happened, where too many versions of herself had existed in quick succession, overlapping and contradicting each other in ways that still made her uneasy if she thought about them too closely.
But in a strange way, it is also neutral now. Or neutral enough. Her ex-husband has no real ties here. The life they built together had existed elsewhere, but not here. Never here.
Coming back to London had felt, in the immediate aftermath, like stepping sideways into a space that was adjacent to everything she had lost but not entirely defined by it. A place where she could reconstruct something without constantly tripping over the remains of what had been.
She sets the mug down with a soft, almost soundless click and leans forward, pen hovering again as she reads over the last line she's written. It isn't quite right. It's close, close enough that she can feel the shape of what it's trying to be, but there's a word missing, or perhaps one too many, something small and precise that will shift the entire meaning if she can just—
Her phone lights up on the table beside her.
It's a small thing, a vibration barely audible against the wood, but it slices cleanly through her concentration, pulling her attention away with an immediacy that feels disproportionate to the interruption. For a moment, she ignores it, determined to hold onto the thread of the lyric before it slips out of reach, but the screen continues to glow in the corner of her vision insistently.
She exhales, sharp and quiet, and reaches for it.
There is no particular reason for the sudden flicker of apprehension that moves through her as she turns the phone over, no rational explanation for the way her chest tightens just slightly, as if bracing for something she cannot yet see. It is, she tells herself, nothing. A message. A notification. Another small demand on her attention in a life that has become, over the years, full of them.
The name on the screen rearranges the air in the room.
For a second—less than a second, really—her brain refuses to process it, as if the letters themselves have been placed in the wrong order, as if this is some kind of visual error that will correct itself if she simply looks at it long enough. But it doesn't. It remains stubbornly, unmistakably what it is.
Matty.
She could have blocked him. That would have been the sensible thing to do, the clean thing, the thing most people in her position would have done without thinking twice about it. There had been a moment, briefly, in the immediate aftermath, where she had even considered it, thumb hovering over the option in a way that felt almost symbolic, as if the act itself might impose some kind of order on what he had left behind.
But she hadn’t.
Not because she thought he would come back (she'd had to accept, eventually, that he wouldn't) but because blocking him would have required acknowledging that there was something to close. And at the time, there hadn’t been. There had been no ending, no closure. He’d simply… disappeared.
Leaving the number there, untouched, had felt less like holding on and more like refusing to tidy up something that had never been properly finished.
Her thumb hovers over the screen, not quite touching it, her entire body gone very still in a way that feels almost artificial, like something held in suspension. There is a strange, hollow rush in her ears, a sudden awareness of her own breathing, the way it has shortened without her noticing.
It has been years.
Not in the vague, imprecise way people sometimes use that word, but literally. Years since she has seen his name appear anywhere that wasn’t filtered through the distance of headlines or second-hand information. Years since there has been any direct line between them, any possibility of this kind of intrusion into the carefully managed boundaries of her life.
She taps the message open.
Matty (6:42 p.m.): hi
It is offensively simple.
No context, no elaboration, no attempt to soften the abruptness of it. Just that one word, sitting there with a kind of quiet audacity that makes something hot immediately flare in her chest.
For a moment she just stares at it, the anger arriving first, familiar in a way that is almost a relief. It is easier, in some ways, to be angry than to feel anything else. Anger has focus, power, control. It does not require her to examine the more complicated, less comfortable things that sit just underneath the surface of it, the things she has spent a considerable amount of time and effort not thinking about.
Because really, what does he expect?
Even now, she can’t really point to when exactly things had ended between them, and that is entirely his fault, because he had given her nothing at all. No explanation, no closing conversation, no attempt to shape the end into something that could be understood or, at the very least, acknowledged. Just absence. A withdrawal so complete and sudden that it had taken her longer than she would ever admit to accept that it wasn’t temporary, that it wasn’t something she could wait out or work around.
And now, years later, he thinks he can just open with hi.
Her grip tightens slightly around the phone, the edge of it pressing into her palm as she exhales slowly through her nose, trying to contain the immediate impulse to respond with something cutting, something that will land exactly where she needs it to and make it very clear that whatever access he once had no longer exists.
In the ends, she doesn’t reply.
Instead, she sets the phone back down on the table, screen still lit for a moment before it dims, the message disappearing from view but not, annoyingly, from her mind.
It should be easy to dismiss. People reach out all the time, for all kinds of reasons, and she has become very good at deciding which of those reasons merit her attention and which do not. There is no obligation here, no expectation that she owes him anything, least of all a response.
And yet.
Her gaze drifts back to the notebook in front of her, to the half-finished line that had felt so urgent only minutes ago, but the words have lost their shape, the thread she’d been following unravelled completely. She tries to pick it back up, to force her attention back into the familiar rhythm of writing, but it refuses to settle, slipping away every time she reaches for it.
Annoying.
More than annoying, actually. Disruptive, in a way that feels disproportionate to a single, innocuous message.
She pushes the notebook away slightly, the pen rolling a fraction across the page before coming to rest, and exhales again, longer this time, as if that might somehow reset whatever it is within her that has been knocked out of alignment.
It doesn’t.
Because now that the initial shock has passed, other thoughts begin to filter in, unwelcome but persistent.
She has not been entirely unaware of his life, of course. It is, for better or worse, almost impossible for someone in her position to remain completely insulated from the movements of someone like him, especially when their histories are so inconveniently intertwined. Even without seeking it out, information has a way of finding her; through headlines she doesn’t click on, through conversations she half-overhears, through the general, ambient awareness that comes with existing in the same orbit.
The 1975's new album had been everywhere last year, impossible to ignore despite how hard she tried. Reviews, interviews, the usual cycle of attention that follows a release that big. She had not listened to it. She had told herself that was a boundary, a reasonable one, an important one, and had stuck to it with a kind of quiet determination that she is, in retrospect, not entirely sure what to make of.
She knows that the album did well, that both critics and fans seemed to have nothing but praise for it. She knows that the band are about to kick off their world tour next month, starting in North America. She knows a lot about his life, more than she would ever admit aloud, at least from the outside.
She also knows about the marriage.
And about the divorce, less than a year later, the details sparse but the conclusion clear enough.
She had not felt anything about that. Not really.
Or at least, nothing she had allowed herself to examine closely.
Her phone lights up again.
This time the reaction is immediate, her gaze snapping to it before she can stop herself, a flicker of something—anticipation, irritation, something less easily named—moving through her chest as she reaches for it.
Matty (6:51 p.m.): i know this is weird
She watched as another message slides through.
Matty (6:51 p.m.): but it's important
She reads it once, twice, the words settling into place with a weight that the first message had not carried.
Important.
It is such a deliberately vague word, doing just enough to suggest significance without offering anything concrete she can push against or dismiss outright. It irritates her, the lack of clarity, the way it forces her into a position of either engaging or walking away without understanding what, exactly, she is walking away from.
Her thumb hovers again, this time closer to the screen, the impulse to respond stronger this time, more immediate.
No.
She exhales, long and controlled, and locks the phone instead, setting it face down on the table with a little more force than is strictly necessary. The sound is still soft, swallowed by the quiet of the room, but it feels decisive, final in a way that she hopes will carry through to the rest of her.
She does not owe him this.
Whatever this is, whatever important thing he thinks justifies reappearing in her life after all this time, it is not her responsibility to engage with it. He made his choices. He closed that door, not her.
Her phone sits where she left it, face down on the table, as if turning it over might be enough to mute the existence of what's waiting beneath the glass. It shouldn't matter. It doesn't, not really. Three messages, nothing more than that, and yet the entire room feels fractionally off, as though something has shifted, just slightly but still enough to be noticed.
Taylor tries, for a while, to forget about it.
She picks up her pen again, re-reads the last line she still has to somehow salvage, attempts to coax something workable out of her brain, something that will carry her forward the way it almost had before she'd let herself get distracted. It almost works. For a few minutes, she can convince herself that the interruption was temporary, that whatever thread that has been severed inside her can be knotted back together with enough focus, another discipline.
But still, the words refuse to settle properly. They sit wrong on the page, slightly misaligned, and she can't seem to find a solution, as if whatever instinct that usually guides her has been dulled, thrown just far enough off balance to become useless.
Eventually she sighs, setting the pen down again, the movement more abrupt than she intends, her gaze drifting, inevitably, back to her phone.
It's ridiculous, the amount of space this is taking up in her head. There is nothing there that requires her attention. Nothing that demands a response. If anything, the lack of detail should make it easier to ignore.
But still...
Her fingers pick at a loose thread on the chair's upholstery, a small, restless movement that she doesn't quite register until she forces herself to still it. A soft weight brushes against her ankle, insistent and familiar, and she startles slightly before looking down. Olivia is winding her way around her leg with quiet determination, tail flicking once in mild irritation at being ignored for too long.
“Hi,” Taylor murmurs absently, the word automatic, her hand dropping to smooth over the cat’s back without really thinking about it, the movement grounding.
She waits a beat longer, as if testing whether the feeling, whatever it is, will pass if she simply gives it time.
It doesn't.
Frustrated, she reaches for the phone again and turns it over. The messages are exactly as she left them.
hi
i know this is weird
but it's important
The restraint of it is what irritates her most, she thinks. The way he has given her nothing to push against, nothing to argue with properly. It would be easier, so much easier, if he had said something careless or self-indulgent, something she could dismantle quickly and decisively. An apology she didn't ask for. An explanation she doesn't want.
Instead, he has done this. Minimal, deliberate, infuriatingly controlled.
Her jaw tightens slightly as she unlocks the screen again, her thumb hovering over the keyboard for only a fraction of a second this time before she starts typing.
If he wants a response, he can have one.
She doesn't overthink it. That would defeat the point. The message comes quickly, sharp and clean and exactly as pointed as she intends for it to be.
Taylor (7:01 p.m.): You don't get to do this.
She sends it before she can reconsider, the small, immediate rush of something—satisfaction, maybe, or just the release of tension—cutting briefly through the weight that has been building in her chest.
For a moment, she simply stares at the screen, waiting.
This part, at least, she understands. This rhythm, this pattern. If there is one thing she and Matty Healy have always been able to do with unnerving precision, it is argue. There is a familiarity to it, a structure she can fall back into without thinking too hard about it. He will push back. He will deflect, or provoke, or twist the conversation just enough to regain some footing. She can already feel it, the bite of it, the way she will respond, the things she will say.
The screen stays still for a long, breathless moment.
And then—
Matty (7:03 p.m.): i know
The reply crashes into Taylor with an unexpected amount of force, so far removed from what she had been bracing for that it takes her a second to process it properly. Her brow furrows slightly, her eyes narrowing as she reads it again.
i know
No defensiveness, or sarcasm, or attempt to redirect. Just agreement. From Matty.
A feeling bubbles up inside her, not quite discomfort, not quite confusion, but close enough to both that she doesn't like it.
Another message appears before she can decide what to do with that feeling.
Matty (7:04 p.m.): can i see you
She lets out a short, incredulous laugh, the sound catching at the back of her throat and fading just as quickly as it came. Of course that's where this is going. It is almost impressive, in a way, how efficiently he has managed to bypass the argument she was prepared to have and move straight to the part where he asks for something.
Her fingers move again, quicker this time, the sharp feeling of irritation returning.
Taylor (7:05 p.m.): No.
There is no hesitation in it, no room for misinterpretation. It is clean, final, exactly as it needs to be.
She almost expects that to be the end of it. Or, at the very least, the beginning of the argument she has been anticipating from the start.
Instead—
Matty (7:06 p.m.): okay
She stares at the word, the simplicity of it almost more frustrating than anything he could have said in protest. It's too easy, too compliant.
Her grip tightens slightly around the phone again, her thumb hovering as she waits, because surely there is more coming, surely this is just a pause before he pushes again, reframes it, finds another angle.
He does.
But not in the way she expects.
Matty (7:07 p.m.): i get it
Matty (7:07 p.m.): don't worry about it
There is something about that, about the quiet withdrawal of it, that unsettles her more than if he had argued. Because this, she realises with a slow, creeping clarity, is not the same dynamic they used to have. He is not meeting her where she is, not rising to the bait she has so deliberately laid out for him. He is... stepping back. Leaving space.
It throws her off balance.
She doesn't like it.
Her gaze lingers on the screen for a moment, her thoughts moving faster now, trying to catch up with the shift of tone, the lack of resistance where she had expected it most. It would be easy, still, to leave it here. He has given her an out, whether he intended to or not. A clean exit, no further engagement required.
She should take it.
Instead, she types.
Taylor (7:09 p.m.): What is it?
The message sits there for a fraction of a second before she sends it, the decision made almost before she is fully aware of it.
The reply comes quicker this time.
Matty (7:09 p.m.): it's not really something i want to get into over text
Of course it isn't.
Her jaw tightens again, her frustration flaring.
Taylor (7:10 p.m.): Then don't.
She sends it immediately, almost reflexively.
The typing indicator appears. Disappears. Appears again.
And then-
Matty (7:11 p.m.): i wouldn't be asking if it wasn't important
That word again. Important. It hits harder this time, less easy to dismiss as vague deflection, more like something deliberately repeated.
Her gaze drops briefly from the screen, unfocused for a moment as she exhales slowly, trying to re-centre herself, to pull the situation back into something that makes sense. This is ridiculous. She is letting this spiral into something far more significant than it has any right to be, giving it weight it has not earned.
Still, her eyes flick back to the screen, her thumb moving over the keyboard slowly.
Taylor (7:12 p.m.): Just tell me.
Barely a second goes by this time before his reply appears.
Matty (7:12 p.m.): i can't
Just two words. Two words that are, for reasons she can't quite articulate, entirely different from everything else he has said so far. Her chest tightens slightly, a small, involuntary reaction that she immediately resents, even as she tries to ignore it.
Matty (7:13 p.m.): i just need to talk to you
Matty (7:13 p.m.): in person
She exhales again, longer this time, her gaze dropping to the table as she presses the heel of her hand briefly against her forehead, as if that might somehow steady the sudden, unwelcome shift in her thoughts.
This is exactly what she didn’t want.
Proximity. Conversation. The possibility of something real, something she cannot control in the same way she can control a message on a screen.
She should say no again.
She opens her mouth slightly, as if the word might come more easily if she gives it space, but nothing follows. Instead, her mind circles back, unhelpfully, to the messages themselves, to the way he has avoided confrontation, the way he has not once tried to pull her into the familiar pattern they used to fall into so easily. To the word important, repeated with quiet insistence. To i can’t.
Her fingers move before she has fully decided to let them.
Taylor (7:15 p.m.): Where?
The response is immediate again this time, as if he has been waiting for that exact question.
Matty (7:15 p.m.): wherever you’re comfortable
That, more than anything else, gives her pause. It is careful. Considerate in a way that feels new. Or perhaps just unfamiliar, after so long without any direct contact to compare it to.
She considers, briefly, suggesting somewhere public. Neutral. A space that would allow her to maintain distance, to keep the interaction contained and finite.
And then immediately dismisses it.
There is no version of this that plays out in public without becoming something else entirely, something observed and speculated on and stripped of whatever privacy it might have had. The thought of it is enough to make her jaw tighten again, a fresh wave of resistance rising up almost instinctively.
No.
If this is happening, it will be on her terms.
Taylor (7:17 p.m.) : Not in public.
Her thumbs continue moving, typing the words ’My place’, before stopping to hover above the send button. She hesitates, the reality of what she is agreeing to settling in. This is not small. This is not insignificant. This is letting him into a space she has very carefully constructed to keep everything dangerous out.
For a moment, she considers deleting it. Rewriting it. Walking it back entirely.
Instead, she sends it.
Taylor (7:18 p.m.): My place.
There is a pause on the other end, longer this time, just enough to register. Then—
Matty (7:19 p.m.): okay
A second message follows almost immediately after.
Matty (7:19 p.m.): thank you
She stares at the words, something in her chest tightening again, though she cannot quite name a reason why. It shouldn’t feel like anything. It doesn’t mean anything.
And yet the room feels different now, subtly altered in a way she knows cannot be undone.
She locks the phone and sets it down more carefully this time, the movement deliberate, measured, as if she can restore some sense of control simply by handling the physical object with enough precision.
It doesn’t work.
Because the fact remains, sitting just beneath the surface of everything else, impossible to ignore now that it has been set in motion.
She is going to see him.
He is coming here.
Fuck.
Taylor tells herself she isn't waiting.
The clock on the wall says 7:42. Then 7:43. The soft, mechanical click of it is barely audible, and yet she tracks it with an almost predatory attention, her gaze lifting toward it more often than she means for it to, as if the act of looking might somehow slow it down.
He said eight.
Not said, exactly. Typed. Brief, characteristically unceremonious.
Matty (7:20 p.m.): eight okay?
She hadn't responded to that, not exactly. She'd just sent her address, a confirmation in itself.
Now, she moves through the flat with a kind of quiet, deliberate efficiency that she would, if pressed, describe as normal. There is nothing outwardly frantic about it, nothing that would suggest anything other than the usual low-level maintenance of a space she keeps carefully in order. A book shifted half an inch to the left. The vase of peonies turned slightly so the more open blooms face the window. A cushion smoothed, then smoothed again, though it had not been out of place to begin with.
It is not nervousness. It is only control, reasserted in small, precise ways.
She pauses in the doorway to the kitchen, her gaze sweeping over the counters as if expecting to find something she has missed. There is nothing, of course. Everything is exactly as it should be, exactly where she left it earlier, and yet she steps forward anyway, wiping her hand once across an already spotless surface before catching herself and stopping.
This is unnecessary. She knows it, and still she can't quite seem to stop it.
She glances down at herself.
Her outfit is... fine. It had been an easy choice at first, something neutral, something unremarkable, something that does not invite interpretation. Loose black pants, a fitted white t-shirt, nothing that reads as effort. She looks at it again now, eyes narrowing slightly, as if trying to see it from the outside.
This is ridiculous, she thinks.
But still she turns, crossing back into the bedroom, pulling open the wardrobe with more force than is strictly necessary. The options inside are familiar, neatly arranged, each piece occupying its assigned place with quiet compliance. She stares at them for a moment.
What does one wear for this?
She wraps her arms around her chest, suddenly feeling exposed. Then, with a sigh, she reaches for a soft grey sweater, and pulls it over her head. It hangs loosely around her, a size too big.
There.
Done.
She closes the wardrobe and steps back, the movement final, before leaving the room, as if that small, contained decision might stand in for the larger one she made less than an hour ago.
It doesn't.
Because no matter how precisely she arranges the surface of things, the fact remains underneath it, unmoved, unaltered.
He is coming here.
The thought feels heavier than it had earlier, somehow more real now that it is attached to a specific time, a narrowing window that she can feel closing in around her.
This is a mistake.
The certainty of it arrives clean and immediate, cutting through the quieter, more ambiguous thoughts that have been circling all evening. She latches onto it instinctively, the clarity of it a relief.
There is still time to stop this. She could text him. Cancel. Say something brief, something impersonal, something that does not invite further conversation. She has done it before, in other contexts, with other people. It would not be difficult.
Her phone sits on the kitchen counter, screen dark, within easy reach.
She doesn't move toward it.
Because alongside that certainty, quieter but no less persistent, is something else.
I need to know what this is.
The thought settles in her chest with an uncomfortable kind of weight, not quite a justification, but something close. It irritates her, this thought.
Need is not a word she likes to apply to something she cannot control.
Her gaze drifts, unbidden, toward the front door, as if she might be able to see through it, to anticipate the exact moment he will appear on the other side. It is absurd. He is not here yet. There are still minutes left on the clock.
7:56.
Too early.
She moves back into the lounge, unable to stay still for long, her attention snagging briefly on the notebook she had abandoned earlier, still lying open on the table where she left it. The half-finished line looks unfamiliar now, disconnected from whatever version of herself had written it, as if it belongs to a different day, a different timeline entirely.
She doesn't touch it. There is no point. Whatever she had been reaching for earlier is gone now, displaced by something far less manageable.
I need to know what this is.
The thought drifts back into her mind, like an itch she just can't quite scratch. Her jaw tightens slightly, irritation surfacing all over again. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter—or at least, it shouldn't. There is nothing he could say to her that would rewrite what happen. It cannot undo it. It cannot—
The doorbell rings.
The sound cuts cleanly through the house, loud enough in the quiet to make her flinch.
For a moment, she does not move. Her gaze fixes on the door, her entire body going very still in an almost unnatural way, as if she has been caught mid-motion and suspended there, held in place by something she cannot quite name.
He's here.
Her eyes flick to the clock. 8:00. He's exactly on time. She can't help the thought that flits through her mind, that being on time is unusual for him. Or at least, it was. She supposes she doesn't really know what's unusual for him anymore.
Well. This is it.
There its a brief, fleeting moment where she considers not answering. She could pretend she isn't home, let the moment pass and deal with whatever fallout comes later.
But she won't do that, even if maybe she should.
She exhales slowly, deliberately, forcing her body back into motion as she crosses the room toward the door, each step measured, controlled, as if the way she moves might somehow dictate how this unfolds.
Her hands pauses on the handle. Just for a second.
And then she opens the door.
For a second, she forgets how to breathe.
Matty Healy stands on the other side of her doorway, close enough now that there is no distance left to soften the reality of him, no buffer of time or imagination to dull the edges. He is simply there, exactly where she knew he would be, and still not quite aligning with whatever version of him she had been expecting.
It is the familiarity that hits first. The shape of his face. The line of his shoulders. The way he holds himself, slightly off-centre, like he can never quite manage to stand in a way that feels entirely still, entirely settled. All of it recognisable enough that, for a moment, it almost overrides everything else.
Almost.
"Hi."
The word comes out level, controlled, before she's fully aware she's even going to say it.
There is a flicker of something across his expression at the sound of her voice, quick and difficult to pin down, before it settles.
"Hi," he says, slightly rough at the edges in a way that makes her chest tighten. "Thanks for—" he starts, then stops, his hand lifting slightly before dropping again, the gesture abandoned halfway through. "For letting me come round."
She doesn't respond straight away.
There is something slightly off about the way he phrased it, or maybe it was the delivery, she can't quite tell which. He sounds like himself. He just... doesn't quite sound like himself.
"You said it was important." She shifts her weight against the doorframe as she says it, a small, deliberate movement that creates just enough distance to feel intentional.
For a moment, it looks like he might deflect. There's a flicker of it, something familiar, something that almost pulls the interaction into a shape she recognises.
It doesn't quite get there.
Instead, he exhales quietly and nods once. "Yeah. It is."
He slides his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, then back out again, like he can’t quite decide what to do with them. His fingers flex once at his sides before going still again. The movement is quick, subtle. She notices it anyway.
“And you really couldn’t have put it in a text?” she asks, voice slightly sharper now, because it feels easier, slipping into that. It feels familiar.
She waits for him to meet her halfway this time. Push back. Give her some fire, some fight, something to work with, anything.
Instead, he lets out a quiet breath that almost passes for a laugh. “Yeah, because I’m famously great at explaining myself over text.”
It’s closer to what she expects from him. Closer, but still not quite right.
She doesn’t smile. “Mm.”
He doesn’t say anything. Neither does she, refusing to be the one to break the tension for him.
Her gaze drifts, briefly, without her meaning for it to. It catches on small, seemingly unimportant things. The way his leather jacket hangs, not wrong, exactly, just… looser than she remembers. The faint shadow along his jaw, darker against skin that looks a little more washed out, a little more pale, than it should under the warmth of her front porch light.
“So…” she says finally, just for something to say, reluctantly giving in, unable to stand the silence any longer. Spit it out, she wants to add, but for reasons she can’t quite pinpoint, she doesn’t.
His eyes flick past her for a second, taking in something over her shoulder, before returning to her. There’s something in that gaze, something she can’t quite read, something that doesn’t stay long enough for her to even begin to try.
“Can I—” he starts, his voice scratchy and low, then hesitates, dropping his gaze to where his feet scuff lightly against her doorstep. “Can I come in?”
The air shifts around them, his words altering the shape of the moment irrevocably. Up until now, there has been a line. He is outside. She is inside. Letting him in removes that.
She becomes aware, suddenly, of the space between them. Of how he’s standing now. Of the way his shoulders seem to hold just a fraction too much tension, as if he’s conscious of them, as if some invisible force is weighing him down. It’s subtle, but it’s there.
This is a mistake.
The thought drifts into her mind again.
She steps back anyway.
“Yeah,” she says. “Come in.”
He nods once and moves forward.
As he passes her, close enough that she has to shift slightly to make space, there’s a brief, passing awareness of him that she doesn’t quite catch in time to name; something about the proximity, about the way he moves, like he’s being just a little more careful than he needs to be.
And then he’s inside.
The door closes behind him with a soft, definitive click.
Taylor lingers by the door, watching Matty drift further into the entryway, the space narrow enough that his presence seems to fill it almost immediately, the air shifting subtly around him as if the house itself has registered the intrusion. He stops just a step or two inside, glancing around, not in a way that feels invasive or prying exactly, but in that quiet, instinctive way of his, his gaze moving over the details she has arranged so carefully, the deliberate absence of anything too personal. Her life, as it exists now. Curated. Contained.
She stays where she is, a few steps behind him, the distance small but deliberate in a way she doesn’t examine. She notices suddenly that her hand still rests loosely against the door handle, like she might, at any moment, change her mind and try to undo the last thirty seconds entirely. Push him out, or run away herself.
The silence folds in on them, thickening, both of them, she realises with a faint, growing irritation, doing the same thing. Skirting. Cycling. Avoiding.
Matty glances down, and Taylor's gaze follows. Benji has appeared out of nowhere, as cats tend to do, and is blinking up at Matty, tail flicking once as if to announce his presence.
"Oh," Matty says, the word warmer than anything else he's said so far, the faintest hint of a smile touching his mouth as he crouches slowly to reach down and run a hand along the cats back. "Hi, mate."
Benji accepts the attention with the same mild entitlement he grants everyone, pressing briefly into Matty's hand before stepping away again, already losing interest.
The moment is small; inconsequential, on the surface. It shouldn't feel like anything. And yet, for a second, it does.
An image, uninvited and unwelcome, surfaces before she can stop it. A different room. A different day. Steam clinging faintly to the air from the shower, sunlight spilling unevenly across kitchen tiles. Him leaning back against the counter, hair damp, glasses sliding slightly down his nose as he watches her move around the space, coffee in one hand, the other absentmindedly stroking a cat that has draped itself across his arm like it belongs there. Easy, and uncomplicated, and... gone.
The memory vanishes as quickly as it arrives, cut off before it can settle into anything more substantial.
Taylor exhales quietly, dragging her attention back to the present with a sharper kind of focus. "So..." she says again, the word cutting between them, a little too deliberate to be casual.
He straightens, slower than she expects, his hand brushing briefly against his thigh as if to steady himself before dropping back to his side.
"Nice place," he says, glancing round again, like he's searching for something else to say, something more precise, and coming up short. “Very… organised.”
She nods once. "Thanks."
Silence falls again, and Taylor almost rolls her eyes. This is going nowhere.
"Come through," she says, already brushing past him before he can respond, the decision made more out of impatience than anything else.
She leads him into the lounge, the familiar space feeling subtly altered now that he is in it, the balance of it shifted in a way she doesn't like. She is aware of him behind her, of the quiet presence of him moving through the house, and she hates distantly, how aware she is of it. She gestures toward the couch, and he sits without a word, lowering himself onto the sofa.
She lingers for a second longer than she needs to, her gaze flickering briefly to the notebook still lying open on the table, her handwriting visible in a way that makes her chest feel tight. Before she can think too much about it, she crosses the room, snapping it shut with a little more force than necessary and setting it aside.
He doesn’t comment.
She lowers herself into the wingback chair opposite him, folding one leg beneath her as she settles in, her posture composed, deliberate, controlled in a way that feels almost performative now.
For a moment, neither of them speaks.
Up close, in the softer light of the room, the details she had only half-noticed at the door become harder to ignore. The shadows beneath his eyes, darker than they should be. His cheekbones, a little more pronounced than usual, the lines of his face just slightly sharper than she remembers.
Tired. That’s what it is. He looks tired.
And not in a casual way. Not the tiredness you feel after a bad night’s sleep or a long week, but something that sits deeper than that, something that doesn’t lift even when he shifts his expression. And there’s something else, a slight disconnect to him, a subtle lack of presence, like part of his attention is elsewhere, pulled inward in a way she can’t quite track, like he’s conversing something, like he’s holding something back.
Her patience, already thin, wears down a little further.
“Well?” she says, the word landing with more force than she intends.
He simply looks at her, a flicker of hesitation in his eyes.
“Are you going to tell me why you’re here?” she says, her tone tightening even further. “Or—what is this exactly?”
There it is again, the beginnings of something that could turn into an argument if he meets her halfway. For a second, she expects him to.
He doesn’t, in the end.
Instead, he leans back slightly, one hand dragging briefly over his face, the movement slower than it should be, like it takes more out of him than it ought to.
“I’m just—” he starts, then stops, exhaling quietly through his nose. “Give me a second, yeah?”
“You’ve had years, Matty,” she snaps before she can stop herself, his evasiveness cutting cleanly through whatever fragile restraint she had been holding onto. “I’m not sure why you suddenly need a second.”
There. That should do it. That should provoke something, should push him into the space she understands, the space where this becomes something she can navigate without thinking too hard about it.
For a second, it almost does.
Something flickers across his face, brief, sharp enough that she recognises it as the beginning of a response, something closer to the version of him she remembers.
And then it’s gone. He doesn’t take the bait. He just sighs, quiet and defeated, and when he looks her in the eye again, the exhaustion in his gaze makes something inside her chest shift, something that she’s been holding onto tightly loosening against her will. Her irritation falters, just slightly, replaced by something less defined, something she doesn’t like the feeling of.
“Matty?” she says, her voice softer than she intends it to be.
For a moment, he doesn’t answer. She watches as he drops his gaze, his hands coming together loosely in front of him, fingers pressing briefly into each other before falling apart again, restless, uncertain.
“Matty?” she says again, quieter now, the word landing differently in the space between them.
“Yeah,” he says, but it’s automatic, not really an answer. Finally, he goes on, “It’s just—” He stops, his mouth pressing briefly into a line, like the sentence has already gone wrong before he’s even managed to get it out. “I didn’t—I don’t really know how to—” He huffs out something that might almost pass for a laugh, except there’s no real humour in it. “Shocking, I know.”
Under different circumstances, she might have responded to that. Might have rolled her eyes, or made a comment, or met him somewhere in the middle of it. Now, she just watches him.
“Just say it,” she says, not unkindly, but not softly either. “Whatever it is.”
He nods once, like he’s agreeing with her in theory, even if he can’t quite follow through on it in practice. “Right. Yeah. Okay.”
He leans forward slightly, elbows resting on his knees, his hands coming together again, fingers lacing this time, then unlacing almost immediately, like even that small act of stillness is too much to hold onto.
“It—” he starts, then falters again, his brow furrowing faintly as he searches for something that feels like the right place to begin. “I don’t know. I just didn’t—” He shakes his head once, as though frustrated with himself. “I thought it was nothing.”
She watches as he drags a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his face in a gesture that feels more automatic than intentional.
“I had this cough,” he says finally, the words coming a little quicker now, like he’s decided, consciously or not, to just keep going before he loses the thread again. “For ages. Like, months. But I always have a cough, so—” He gives a small, dismissive shrug, one shoulder lifting slightly higher than the other. “Didn’t exactly seem urgent, did it?”
His words should be defensive, but he delivers them softly, resignedly.
“I mean, I’ve been smoking since I was, what, thirteen?” he adds, glancing up at her briefly, like he’s expecting some kind of reaction, some confirmation that this makes sense.
Taylor’s expression doesn’t change.
“Go on,” she says.
He looks at her for a second longer, then nods, his gaze dropping again almost immediately.
“But then—” He pauses, his fingers pressing briefly into his palm, like he’s trying to anchor himself. “I found this… thing.” A small, vague gesture toward his neck, not quite touching it. “Just—like a lump. Here.”
Taylor’s stomach tightens at that, just slightly, like a bad omen.
“And I still didn’t—” He lets out a quiet breath, something closer to frustration now. “I don’t know. I just didn’t think it was—” He trails off, shaking his head again. “Stupid.”
There’s a pause, the silence ringing in Taylor’s ears.
“They found something,” he says then, the phrasing oddly distant, like he’s quoting someone else, like the ownership of it hasn’t quite settled with him yet.
Taylor’s patience snaps, just a fraction. “What does that mean?” she asks, leaning forward slightly in her chair. “Matty, what does ‘they found something’ mean?”
“I know, I know,” he says quickly, like he’s trying to get ahead of her frustration, to smooth it over before it builds into something bigger. “I’m just—I’m getting there, alright?”
He drags a hand over his face again, slower this time, lingering briefly at his mouth before dropping away.
“I went in,” he continues, the words uneven now, less controlled. “They checked it out, sent me for scans, and—” He exhales, the sound thin. “More scans. Blood tests. All of that. They kept saying it was probably nothing. Or—nothing bad. Infection, or whatever, you know?”
Taylor’s fingers curl slightly against the arm of the chair, her focus narrowing. “And?” she presses.
He looks at her again, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “Then they said it wasn’t,” he says, quieter now.
“Wasn’t what?” she asks tightly.
He exhales slowly, like the words are sitting somewhere just out of reach and he has to physically push them into place.
“Nothing,” he says. He swallows, his throat bobbing. “And then it was—” He stops, his jaw tightening slightly, the muscle there shifting as he swallows. “They started talking about biopsies, and oncology, and—” He gives a short, almost disbelieving shake of his head. “All that stuff you never think is actually going to apply to you.”
The word hangs there. Oncology. It hits Taylor like a punch to the gut.
“Matty,” she says, quieter now, but more insistent. “Just—what is it?”
There’s a long pause, long enough that she can hear the distant sound of a car passing somewhere outside, the subtle shift of his breathing as it changes, steadies, then falters again.
When he speaks this time, his voice is different, lower, stripped back, no deflection left in it.
“It’s…” He stops, pressing his lips together briefly, like even now the words don’t quite want to come. “They said it’s—”
Another pause, his gaze dropping back down to his hands.
Then finally, he says, “It’s lymphoma.”
Lymphoma. The word sits there in the space between them, as if it has been placed carefully on the table alongside everything else, no more significant than the closed notebook and the vase of flowers.
Taylor goes very still, save for a tiny twitch of her left eye. It is not a conscious decision. It happens the way it always has when something refuses to make immediate sense to her, when the world shifts fractionally off-axis and her mind, instead of following, holds its position and waits for everything else to correct itself around her.
Because it will. It has to.
Lymphoma.
The word feels wrong. Not in its meaning—she knows what it is, vaguely, abstractly—but in its placement, here, in this space. In the context of him. Of this room. Of this moment.
It doesn’t belong here.
“You’re—” she starts, and then stops, the sentence catching before it can fully form. She tries again, slower this time, more deliberate. “You’re serious.”
It isn’t quite a question, but it isn’t a statement either. It hangs somewhere uncertain between the two, like she’s offering him an opportunity to correct it. To reframe it into something less absolute. To take it back, to tell her this whole thing is just a sick joke.
But—
“Yeah,” he says, quietly.
Taylor blinks once, a small, automatic movement, her mind already moving ahead, trying to catch up, to find a way through it that makes sense.
“No,” she says, almost immediately, the word slipping out before she has consciously decided to say it. “That doesn’t—that doesn’t make sense.”
It sounds insufficient even as she says it, too small to hold the weight of what she’s trying to push back against, but it’s the closest thing she has right now.
Because it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense.
He is sitting right in front of her. Talking. Breathing. Looking, aside from the things she has already noticed and chosen not to fully examine, like he always has. Normal. Not like someone who—
She's not stupid. She knows enough to know that illness doesn’t always announce itself in obvious, dramatic ways, that it can exist quietly, invisibly, beneath the surface of things.
And still, her mind resists it anyway.
“When did they tell you that?” she asks, the question almost clinical in its precision, like she’s searching for something she can anchor herself to. Facts. Timeline. Structure. Her voice is steady, too steady maybe, but she doesn’t pay much attention to that. “Like—when was this?”
“A couple of days ago,” he says.
Taylor inhales slowly, trying to regulate herself. “Okay,” she says, even though it isn’t. “Okay, but… what does that actually mean? Like, what stage is it? What are they—what are they doing about it? You said scans, and biopsies, so they’ve—” She stops, the words tangling slightly as they come too fast, her thoughts outrunning her ability to articulate them cleanly. “They’ve caught it, right?”
In her words, she hears the first hint of something more frantic slipping out. Not outright panic, not yet, but something adjacent. Urgency, maybe. The need for it to already be under control, already contained, already moving toward resolution.
“They’ve caught it,” she repeats when he doesn’t respond, this time with more insistence, as if saying it again might solidify it into fact. “It’s treatable… right?”
Matty looks at her, and for a beat, there’s something in his expression that unsettles her, something she can’t quite place, too quick to fully read before it shifts into something more neutral.
“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”
He pauses.
And in that small, stretching gap, something inside her pulls taut, like a thread threatening to snap.
“But?” she prompts quietly.
He exhales, a quiet breath that seems to take more out of him than it should, his shoulders shifting faintly as if he’s adjusting something she can’t quite see.
“It’s just—” he starts, then stops, his mouth pressing briefly into a line. “It’s a bit… far along.”
The words are vague, deliberately so, and something in her resists them immediately.
“How far?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer straight away, his gaze dropping again, his thumb dragging absently across his knuckle, back and forth, back and forth, like he’s trying to wear a hole in his skin.
“Matty,” she says his name again, firmer this time in a way that doesn’t leave much room for avoidance.
He lets out a breath that almost resembles a laugh, though it doesn’t quite get there.
“Stage four,” he says.
Just like that, dropped into the room with the same strange, offhand quality as everything else, as if the words themselves don’t quite belong to him yet, as if he’s still trying them on for size.
For a moment, Taylor doesn’t understand what he’s said. Not properly. The words register—stage four—but they don’t attach themselves to anything concrete, don’t slot neatly into place the way they’re supposed to. They hover, disconnected, like a phrase in a language she knows but suddenly can’t translate.
Then they do, and everything else tilts.
Her body doesn’t move. If anything, she goes even stiller, every muscle in her holding its position with quiet, almost unnatural precision, as if any movement at all might tip something irreversibly out of balance.
“No,” she says, with one small, controlled shake of the head, like she’s correcting a simple error. “Stage four is—that’s…” She trails off, no words seeming to fit properly into her sentence.
Matty huffs out a breath through his nose, glancing up at her briefly, something wry flickering faintly across his expression.
“Yeah,” he says, like he understands exactly what she wants to say even if she can’t seem to put words to it. “Yeah, I know.”
Her gaze stays locked on him, searching now, as if she might be able to find the inconsistency in him, the thing that proves this is wrong, that this has been exaggerated or misunderstood or miscommunicated somewhere along the way.
“But you said it’s treatable,” she presses. “You said—”
“It is,” he cuts in, quickly this time, like he can hear the direction she’s heading in and is trying to steady it before it spirals. “It is. It’s just—” He hesitates again, his jaw tightening slightly. “It’s not exactly ideal, is it.”
There’s a beat, and then, almost as an afterthought, like he can’t quite help himself—
“So, yeah. A bit... properly fucked, statistically speaking," he adds, with a faint, crooked attempt at a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
Taylor doesn’t react to the joke—or rather, she does, but not in the way she is certain he expects. There is no softening, no flicker of reluctant amusement, no easing of the tension. Instead, something in her expression hardens, just slightly, her eyes sharpening further as if the deflection has snapped something into focus.
“Stop,” she says, quiet but firm. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“That,” she says, gesturing vaguely toward him, toward the space his words have just occupied. “Joking like that. Like it’s—” She cuts herself off, her mouth tightening. “It’s not funny.”
“I know,” he says, the already half-hearted smile slipping off his face, his expression morphing into something more neutral. “I’m just—” He exhales, dragging a hand briefly over the back of his neck, his fingers pressing there for a second before dropping again. “I don’t really know how else to—”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to.
Silence falls, neither of them quite knowing what to say, and Taylor finds that her mind is still circling, still searching for the part of this that will make it make sense, make it align with the version of reality she woke up in this morning.
It isn’t supposed to happen like this. Not to him. Not here. Not now.
Her gaze drifts, just for a second, unfocused, the room around them blurring slightly at the edges as her thoughts move faster than she can keep up with, looping back over the same points again and again, as if repetition might force them into coherence.
Lymphoma.
Stage four.
She swallows, her throat suddenly dry.
“Okay,” she says finally. “Okay.”
Even in her own mind, it doesn’t sound convincing.
“Why…” she begins softly, then trails off, unsure how exactly to ask the question that’s been swimming in the back of her mind this whole time. “Why are you telling me?”
Matty looks up at that, and for a second, it seems like he might fall into old routines, deflect, make a joke of it all. His mouth opens slightly, then closes, his jaw shifting like he’s reconsidering whatever instinctive response had been forming.
“I just…thought you should know.”
Taylor doesn’t respond right away, something about the simplicity of it catching in her chest and sitting there in a way she doesn’t quite know what to do with. It bypasses all the places she had been prepared to defend, all the arguments she’d had lined up.
“I also…” he continues abruptly, then hesitates again, letting out a quiet breath. “I wanted to apologise. For everything. I just… I didn’t handle it well. At all. And—” He shakes his head once, frustrated. “I’m sorry.”
Taylor doesn’t say anything.
“I thought I should at least…” he continues, slower now, more deliberate, like he’s remembering something he practiced earlier in front of the mirror, “I don’t know, try to make it right. Or, you know, as right as it can be. Just—” He falters slightly. “Just in case.”
Just in case.
Under any other circumstance, she knows exactly how this would go. She can almost hear it, the way she would push back, pick apart the timing of it, the implication of it. Tell him he doesn’t get to come back now, doesn’t get to ask for closure when he’s the one who denied it to her. And yet… nothing comes. The anger is there, somewhere. It hasn’t disappeared. But it feels somehow out of reach, like it’s been pushed out of frame by the weight of what sits between them now.
“I’m not expecting anything from you,” Matty adds quickly, like he’s misread her silence, like he’s trying to get ahead of something. “I’m not asking you to forgive me, or—” He shakes his head again. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“I know,” she says, the words coming automatically, like she somehow just instinctively knows them to be true.
He watches her for a second longer, like he’s trying to decide whether to believe that, then nods once, the tension in his shoulders easing just slightly.
“When do you start treatment?” Taylor asks, her brain searching once again for something more practical to anchor itself to.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
“Tomorrow? Wow, that’s…” She exhales, shaking her head slightly. “That’s soon.”
“Yeah,” he says with a slight shrug. “They seem weirdly keen to get on with it. Not sure why.”
“Matty,” she scolds firmly.
The slight hint of amusement in his expression fades. “Right. I know.”
A memory surfaces in Taylor’s mind, uninvited. A sterile-smelling hospital room. The steady rhythm of machines. Her mom, diminished and exhausted in a way that had settled into her bones, in a way that made even simple things—eating, standing, speaking—become something that required effort.
Taylor swallows, her throat tightening slightly. “Do you—” She stops, recalibrates, then starts again. “Is someone going to check in on you after?”
Matty frowns slightly. “After what?”
“After chemo,” she says, like it should be obvious, which it should be. “To help you.”
“With what?”
Taylor stares at him. “With… with everything,” she says. “Matty, you’re not going to just walk out of there and be fine. You know that, right?”
He shifts slightly, something flickering across his face. Uncertainty, maybe, or discomfort.
“I’ll be alright,” he says. “It’s just—”
“No,” she cuts in, firm now, a hint of frustration in her voice. “It’s not ‘just’ anything. You’re going to feel like shit.” Her bluntness surprises even herself, but she doesn’t soften it. “You’ll be exhausted, and probably nauseous, and you won’t want to eat, and—” She stops herself, the rest of her words catching in her throat.
He watches her silently, his expression unreadable.
“You need someone there,” she finishes, quieter now. “Trust me.”
There’s a brief silence.
Then Matty sighs. “I haven’t exactly told anyone else.”
Taylor stares at him, her mouth dropping open just slightly.
Of course. This is classic Matty, so him in a way that feels both familiar and deeply, deeply irritating. To hold something like this in, to carry it alone for as long as possible, to only share the burden when there is no other option left.
“You can’t just go through this alone, Matty,” she tells him finally.
“I’m not—”
“You are,” she cuts in. “You literally just told me you haven’t told anyone.”
He doesn’t argue, just sits there, silent.
The decision comes before she fully processes it.
“I’ll come by,” she says.
Matty blinks. “What?”
“After,” she clarifies. “I’ll come by and check on you.”
He stares at her for a second, clearly surprised. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t come here for that,” he says, shaking his head slightly. “I’m not trying to… pull you back into anything.”
“Matty, I know,” she says again, firmer this time. “I just—” She stops, catching herself before the explanation can fully form, before it becomes something she has to examine too closely. “You shouldn’t be alone.”
“You don’t owe me that,” he says quietly.
“Good thing that’s not why I’m doing it, then.”
“Taylor—”
“I want to,” she interrupts.
That seems to give him pause, his open mouth pressing into a thin line. For a moment, he just looks at her. Then, slowly, he nods.
“Okay,” he says.
Neither of them speaks again.
Taylor shifts back in the chair, the movement small, almost absent-minded, her fingers brushing once against the armrest before stilling there. Across from her, Matty doesn’t move much at all; he just sits, his hands loosely linked, his shoulders lowered slightly in a way that feels less like ease and more like something set down, briefly, because it had become too heavy to keep carrying.