part 2

Part 2: “At twelve?

Absolutely. I sang like a haunted tea kettle.”

Callum laughed for the first time all day.

She asked about his company, and he expected polite interest. Instead, she listened as if his dream mattered.

When he confessed he might be delusional, she studied him quietly.

“You’re not,” she said.

“You just met me.”

“I know. But I know fire when I see it. You’ve got it in your eyes. The kind people try to put out because they’re scared of what happens if it spreads.”

That night, when they exchanged numbers outside the club, the air smelled like rain and hot pavement. Callum watched Kellis step into a cab and felt, absurdly, like his life had just changed direction.

It had.

Over the next two years, she became the person he called first with good news and the only person he trusted with bad news. When MercerShield landed its first

real investor, Kellis met him at a Brooklyn diner at six in the morning for pancakes and cheap coffee. When she booked a Friday night residency at a respected Manhattan venue, Callum arrived with flowers from a bodega and sat in the front row like she was performing at Carnegie Hall.

They moved in together after eight months.

Their apartment was not much better than his first one, but it was theirs. Secondhand couch. Mismatched plates. A dining table Callum sanded and refinished himself. A refrigerator that made a noise like an angry lawn mower. They cooked pasta in the tiny kitchen, danced barefoot in the living room, fought over bills, made up over takeout, and talked on Sunday mornings about the kind of future neither of them had dared imagine before.

Marriage.

Children.

A house with a porch.

Nothing extravagant. Just real.

“I love you,” Callum told her one

summer night on the roof of their building, the city glittering around them.

Kellis looked at him with tears in her eyes.

“You sure about that, Mercer?”