Chapter 82: Idle Thoughts
Darren stood at the door with his jacket on and looked at Liam for a moment, he had so much to say but no words came out of her mouth.
Liam kept it simple.
"Text me when you’re home."
"I will."
"And Darren." Liam held his eye. "I meant everything I said. Every word. This isn’t something I’m going to forget about by next week."
Darren nodded slowly. "I know."
"Good."
Darren extended his fist. Liam met it without ceremony and the door closed and the apartment went quiet again.
Liam stood in the hallway for a moment after the lock clicked.
He exhaled — long, slow, the kind that carries more than air. The morning had been heavier than he’d anticipated when the doorbell first rang and he’d padded to the peephole half asleep. What he’d opened the door to was a version of Darren he had never seen before and hoped not to see again — hollowed out, trembling, carrying something that had nearly taken him somewhere neither of them could have come back from easily, if ever.
He went to the sofa and sat.
The scars had bothered him more than he’d shown. Not the bruises from last night — those would fade. The older ones. The ones visible when Darren had changed into clean clothes, running along his ribs and one shoulder with the particular quality of marks that had been there long enough to settle into the skin permanently.
Darren’s past was a closed room that Liam had learned years ago not to knock on uninvited. He knew the outline — difficult years before they’d met, a home environment that hadn’t given him much to work with. Darren had built himself from whatever materials had been available and the result was a man of exceptional character and exceptional stubbornness who treated survival as a baseline rather than an achievement.
"He always found a way through," Liam thought. "That was the thing about Darren. He always survived."
He stared at the ceiling for a while doing nothing specific.
It was the first genuine pause he’d taken in days.
After a while his mind drifted to Rachel.
He thought about the phone call that had ended the night. The crying he’d heard through the door. Whatever that call had been — whoever was on the other end at that hour — it had reached something she kept carefully managed and he respected the management enough not to push on it.
The instinct to check in was there. He acknowledged it and set it aside.
Rachel needed space right now, not presence. Showing up too soon after a vulnerable moment would tip the balance of what they had toward something she might not be ready for, and he wasn’t interested in manufacturing dependency in a woman who was already navigating something difficult. The system had labelled her low investment but Liam’s conscience had its own rating system and it ran independently.
He would reach out. Just not today.
He picked up his phone and opened a browser.
He’d been thinking about a gift for her — something considered without being overwhelming. He set a mental ceiling of a thousand dollars and started browsing. Jewellery made sense — something she could wear daily, something personal without being presumptuous.
He found a set within fifteen minutes. A delicate necklace, quality chain, the pendant clean and well-proportioned. It suited what he knew of her taste.
Then he saw the customisation option.
Her name engraved. Additional cost — $500.
He looked at the total.
[$1,500.]
"I know I have the money," he muttered, "but this is a complete rip off."
He closed the tab.
The principle of it bothered him more than the amount. Something about the mechanics of paying a $500 premium for six letters engraved by a machine that took thirty seconds sat wrong in a way he couldn’t fully rationalise but didn’t feel the need to. He’d find something else. Something that didn’t feel like a markup designed to exploit the specific human desire to make things personal.
He put the phone down.
And his mind went to Mike unprompted.
The doctor’s advice surfaced briefly — "find a new trainer" — and Liam dismissed it with the same energy he’d dismissed it in the hospital.
Mike was extreme, Mike had carried him over one shoulder into a gym like a piece of luggage. Mike had also built more genuine physical progress into four days than Liam had achieved in the previous six months of telling himself he should probably start working out.
The body was adjusting. That was all the hospital visit had confirmed.
He wasn’t replacing Mike.
He picked up his phone again and checked Instagram out of mild boredom.
The notification from Vanessa’s follow was still sitting there, unaddressed. He scrolled past it and saw something in his message requests that stopped him.
A name he recognised from a different era entirely.
High school. A girl — woman now, clearly — whose account was private, the profile picture small but enough to confirm the face matched the name. The message was a few days old, which explained why it had landed in requests rather than his main inbox. She must have removed him as a follower at some point and he hadn’t noticed, which meant the follow he thought he had on her account had lapsed quietly without announcement.
He read the message once and set the phone face down without responding.
He’d deal with it later.
He looked around the apartment — clean, quiet, entirely his own — and thought about the fact that he had no schedule today. No firm to report to. No case files. No nine AM calls with partners who had less ability than their title suggested.
He thought about gaming.
Not for any strategic reason. Not connected to Mateo or Sophia or any thread he was currently managing. Just — he was bored, he had money, and he had been giving everyone else entertainment infrastructure without considering his own.
He reached for his laptop and opened the same retailer he’d used for Mateo’s order.
He browsed without urgency, which was a feeling he was still getting used to.