The city was awake now.
Cars hissed on wet pavement. The smell of exhaust and roasted coffee hung in the air. People bustled past her, heads down, on their way to lives that made sense.
Audrey walked like a ghost among them.
The plastic pregnancy test was a toxic talisman in her coat pocket. She kept touching it, the sharp edges a reminder of the truth. Positive. Cole’s. The end.
She found the pub by the smell of stale beer and salt. The Crow’s Nest. A faded wooden sign of a bird clutching a spyglass swung in the wind. It looked dark. Closed, maybe.
She pushed the heavy oak door anyway.
The inside was dim, smelling of old wood and whiskey. A long, scarred bar gleamed under a single low-hanging light. It was empty except for a lone figure hunched over a coffee mug at the far end.
The man from last night.
Kian.
Her heart hammered a frantic, terrified rhythm against her ribs. She should leave. This was a mistake. A desperate, childish impulse.
But her feet were frozen to the floor.
He looked up, his stormy eyes locking onto hers from across the room. Recognition dawned. He didn’t smile, not exactly, but the tension in his shoulders eased. He gave a slight nod toward the bar. An invitation.
She walked toward him, each step an argument with herself.
The bartender, a burly man polishing a glass, grunted a hello.
“Coffee?” Kian asked. His voice was that same low rumble from the night before. It settled somewhere deep in her chest.
She nodded, unable to speak. She slid onto the stool next to him, leaving a careful space between them. It didn’t matter. She could feel the heat radiating from him.
“You’re out early,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Couldn’t sleep.” The lie came easily.
The bartender set a thick ceramic mug in front of her. The steam warmed her face. She wrapped her cold hands around it.
“Me neither,” Kian said, staring into his own mug. “The tides don’t wait.”
Silence fell between them, but it wasn’t awkward. It was comfortable, weighted. A shared moment of quiet in a world that was screaming. She took a sip of coffee. It was black and bitter and perfect.
“What do you do?” she asked, the question surprising her own ears.
He turned to face her, leaning an elbow on the bar. “Logistics.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s a very corporate word for a guy in a place like this.”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “It’s a corporate world. I just work on the edges of it. I make sure things get from where they are to where they need to be. Ships, containers, cargo. It’s a big, messy puzzle. I like puzzles.”
He spoke about it simply, but with an underlying authority she couldn’t place. He saw the whole picture. She got the sense he wasn’t just moving boxes; he was moving the world.
“And you?” he asked, his gaze intense. “What do you do when you’re not running into strangers in the dark?”
A real, unexpected laugh escaped her. It sounded rusty. “I’m a curator. At the Metropolitan Arts Museum.”
His eyes lit with genuine interest. “A curator. So you’re the one who decides which stories get told.”
No one had ever put it like that before. Cole called it “arranging old junk.”
“I try to,” she said, the passion she normally kept hidden bubbling to the surface. “My current exhibit is on the economic and cultural impact of 18th-century shipping routes. How the transport of goods—porcelain, spices, textiles—didn’t just change economies, it reshaped entire societies.”
She stopped, embarrassed. She was rambling.
“Keep going,” he said, his voice quiet but firm. “Porcelain from where?”
“The Jingdezhen kilns in China. The blue and white patterns were specifically designed for European markets. They created a frenzy. People were desperate for it. It changed the way people decorated their homes, what they aspired to own. A teacup wasn’t just a teacup. It was a story of a dangerous voyage, of global trade, of a collision of cultures.”
She watched his face as she spoke. He wasn’t just listening; he was absorbing it. He saw the connections.
“So the puzzle pieces you manage today,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the docks, “are the descendants of the puzzle pieces you put in your exhibit.”
“Exactly.” The word was a breath of relief. He got it. He actually got it.
They talked for hours. The pub slowly filled with the morning regulars—fishermen and dockworkers grabbing coffee before their shifts. The noise faded into a background hum.
Audrey felt a wall inside her crumble. She didn’t talk about Cole. She didn’t talk about the dress or the gala or the two pink lines in her pocket. She talked about history. About the scent of old canvas and the thrill of discovering a forgotten artifact. She talked about the person she was before Cole had started sanding down her edges.
He told her about the ports he’d seen. Hong Kong. Rotterdam. Singapore. He described the chaos and the energy, the sheer scale of it all. He spoke with the weariness of a man who had seen too much, who was searching for something solid in a world that was always in motion.
“Sounds lonely,” she said softly.
His gaze dropped to the scarred surface of the bar. “It can be.” He looked back up at her, and his eyes held a raw vulnerability that stole her breath. “It’s hard to find something real. Something that isn’t just… cargo.”
He was talking about more than just his job. She knew it. He was talking about a feeling she knew all too well. Being an accessory. A possession. A piece of art in a gilded frame.
The air between them crackled. The space she had so carefully maintained had vanished. His knee was almost touching hers. She could smell the scent of sea salt and clean laundry on his skin.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A harsh, electronic violation of their bubble.
She knew who it was without looking.
The light in her eyes died. Kian saw it instantly. He saw the mask of the happy, passionate curator fall away, replaced by the haunted look of the woman he’d met last night.
“Cole,” she said, the name tasting like poison on her tongue. “My… fiancé.”
Kian’s expression hardened. It was subtle, just a tightening of his jaw, but it was there. He looked at her, then at the door, as if calculating the distance to an escape route.
The phone buzzed again. And again. A frantic, demanding pulse.
“You don’t have to go back,” Kian said, his voice a low growl. “To whatever is making you look like that.”
His words hung in the air. It wasn’t a plea. It was a statement of fact. A lifeline thrown into the wreckage of her morning.
She could stay here. In the dark, warm pub with the man who saw her.
Or she could go back to the cage. Back to the lies and the control and the perfect, suffocating future that was growing inside her.
The phone buzzed one more time, a final, angry summons.