My phone rang. And this time I answered it.

“I’m sorry, I said hurtful things to you.” It was a cocktail of three of Oliver’s voices: stern poured over a base of secretly amused with a dash of contrite. “But please don’t pretend to be murdered.”

The words especially not when my dad just died hung unspoken between us. And the fact that they remained unspoken was probably a sign that we were in a slightly better space than we had been a few hours ago. “Sorry.” I lay back on the bed and shut my eyes. “For that and for, you know, I said some pretty mean things too. I think all the wedding stuff is just getting really…”

“I know.” Oliver did his best to beam understanding down the phone at me, and I caught at least some of it. “I assume you’re at your mother’s.”

“Yes,” I told him. “I’ll…I’ll stay here tonight, if that’s okay? Because it’d feel a bit shitty to show up on her doorstep and then bail the moment it’s convenient.” Plus, if I was honest, I wasn’t totally sure we wouldn’t start setting each other off again if I went straight back.

Oliver made a kind of auditory nod. “You’re right. It’s getting late. I’ll miss you, of course.”

“I’ll miss you too.” And it wasn’t a lie because I would. I’d miss his warmth and the steady rhythm of his breath in the dark. The way we’d sometimes roll apart naturally in the night and Oliver would always end up rolling back. The special occasions where we’d both wake up horny and work still seemed forever away. Not that there’d been so many of those lately.

But right now? There were also a bunch of things I wouldn’t miss. Like the not-quite-arguments and the not-quite compromises and the constant spectres of things not-quite-said. It was almost like one of us was cheating, except it wasn’t one of us, it was both of us, and what we were cheating with was our own wedding.

“What are we going to do?” I asked, unintentionally out loud.

Oliver sighed. “Well, having looked into it, I think that you’re right, and there’s no sense hiring a band if we can’t find one that either of us feel strongly about.”

It wasn’t what I’d meant, but it was the closest we were going to get. “Okay. That’s… Thanks.”

“But I also think,” Oliver went on, “that DJs are a bit—sorry to say this—tacky.”