Cracks Over Breakfast

“It’s in the small rituals—the smell of bacon, the breaking of an egg—that you notice whether love is holding firm, or beginning to slip through the cracks.”

I woke to bacon.

The smell reached me before consciousness fully did, threading through the remnants of dreams I couldn't quite remember. Something about orange sand and buildings that weren't there yet, structures rising from nothing toward a sky that had learned to hold colour. The images scattered as I surfaced, leaving only the familiar warmth of breakfast sounds drifting from the kitchen and the slightly less familiar coldness of sheets that held no impression of Jamie's body beside mine.

My lips curved into a smile before I made a conscious decision to smile. It was one of those reflex responses that bypass thought entirely, muscle memory of a decade's worth of mornings that had started exactly like this: Jamie in the kitchen, the spit and hiss of eggs in the pan, the particular rhythm of his movements as he orchestrated breakfast.

The smell wrapped around me as I lay there, rich and familiar. Bacon fat crisping at the edges. Eggs beginning their transformation from liquid possibility to solid sustenance. Toast, probably, browning in the toaster we'd bought together three years ago when the old one finally died in a spectacular shower of sparks. These were the sounds and smells of a life built in small accumulations, and despite everything—despite the spare room and the growing silences and the secrets multiplying in my chest like something I should probably see a doctor about—they still felt like home.

I hauled myself upright, joints protesting the sudden demand for verticality. The bedroom held that particular grey light of Tasmanian winter mornings, soft and noncommittal, unwilling to make promises about what kind of day it intended to be.

"Smells delicious!" I called out as I shuffled toward the kitchen, my voice still thick with the residue of sleep. The words came out slightly muffled, half-formed, the verbal equivalent of someone still putting their sentences together from component parts. My arms rose above my head in a stretch that felt necessary for survival, vertebrae popping in sequence like tiny declarations of independence, muscles reluctantly releasing their grip on the night's tensions.

"Your favourite," Jamie replied, and when he glanced over his shoulder the smile he gave me illuminated more than just his face.

I stopped in the doorway, caught by the sight of him.

Morning light was streaming through the kitchen window, catching the planes of his features in that golden relief that photographers spend thousands of dollars trying to replicate. His frame—broader than mine—was silhouetted against the brightness, outlined in that soft halo that made him look almost otherworldly. The cooktop hissed behind him, the pan spitting its small complaints, and he moved with that particular grace of someone comfortable in their own body, easy in their own skin.

Something tightened in my chest that had nothing to do with secrets or distance or the vast cosmic revelations I was carrying around like unexploded ordnance. This was simpler. Older. The same force that had pulled me across a crowded room toward him ten years ago, back when we were both younger and I hadn't yet learned how many ways love could complicate itself.

But ten years teaches you things. Attraction, I'd learned, was only one ingredient in the recipe. Necessary but not sufficient. Beneath the pull of his body and the warmth of his smile, there were other threads holding us together—trust, understanding, presence—and some of those threads had been fraying lately. I could feel them loosening when I let myself pay attention, small failures of tension that hadn't broken anything yet but were accumulating in ways I didn't know how to address.

"Oh, I spoke to Paul yesterday afternoon," I said, keeping my tone light, casual, as if this were just another conversational detail being dropped into the morning air like sugar into coffee. My voice didn't betray me, which was something of a miracle given what I actually knew about that conversation—the manipulation I'd deployed, the memories I'd weaponised, the lies I'd told about relationship problems that didn't exist in the form I'd described them.

I crossed to the island bench, letting my hip rest against its cool stone surface. The kitchen still carried traces of the renovation we'd finished six months ago—that faint undertone of sawdust and fresh paint beneath the sharper smells of breakfast. We'd designed this space together, argued over tile colours and cupboard handles, celebrated when it was finally done with champagne we couldn't really afford. The room held those memories alongside the current tension, two timelines occupying the same coordinates.

My hand found the coffee jar almost without conscious direction, moving through the familiar ritual of scooping granules into a mug. The dark powder tumbled against ceramic with a soft sound that promised clarity, focus, the sharp bitter edge that would slice through whatever fog remained between me and the day.

"And?"

Jamie's voice cut through my reverie, sharper than I'd expected. There was impatience there, a thread of something that suggested he knew this conversational opening wasn't as casual as I was pretending it to be.

"And," I began, drawing the word out longer than necessary, buying myself those few extra heartbeats of preparation. The truth of what I'd done—what I was about to ask—pressed against me from inside, insistent and uncomfortable. I could feel the resistance I was about to encounter building in the air between us like static before a storm.

"He's having some family issues and is flying to Hobart from Adelaide on the first flight this morning. I need you to pick him up, please."

The final word hung in the air between us, a request dressed up as a plea. I'd shaped it carefully, layered sincerity and urgency together in proportions I hoped would soften whatever was coming. My eyes found his, searching for any flicker of willingness, any crack in the armour of annoyance I could already see forming.

The kitchen seemed to tighten around us. The sounds of cooking faded into background static as something larger than breakfast began to occupy the space—a negotiation, a confrontation, the kind of charged silence that happens when two people who love each other are about to disappoint each other anyway.

"Is he paying for it himself this time?"

The words landed with the weight of a verdict already reached. I felt them hit, felt myself flinch internally even as my face stayed composed. Jamie's gaze bored into me, hard and knowing, and my own eyes betrayed me—slipping away to the countertop, to the steam rising from my half-prepared coffee, to anywhere that wasn't the accusation in his stare.

He was right to ask. That was the thing I couldn't escape. Between Jamie and Paul, there was a ledger that had never balanced, a history of emergency phone calls and last-minute rescues and one particularly expensive Christmas when we'd paid for Paul to visit because he couldn't afford it and I couldn't stand the thought of him alone during the holidays. At the time, I'd told myself it was what family required. Sacrifice. Support. The willingness to give when giving was hard.

But afterward, Jamie had been clear. A line drawn in the sand of our shared finances, firm and uncompromising. We can't keep doing this. We can't keep being his safety net. He has to learn to handle his own problems. And I'd agreed. I'd promised.

And now here I stood, toes pressing right up against that boundary I'd sworn to respect, the heat of guilt climbing into my face despite my best efforts to suppress it. The stone bench was cool against my hip, a sharp counterpoint to the flush I could feel spreading across my skin.

"You're paying again, aren't you?" Jamie's tone hardened further, disappointment threading through each syllable. The sound of it cut through the morning air, slicing through whatever fragile peace had existed when I'd walked in. "I thought we agreed after last time we weren't going to pay for him again."

"I know," I murmured, the words barely more than a whisper. They sounded small against the sizzle of the stove, insufficient and pathetic, the verbal equivalent of showing up to a sword fight with a spoon. "But this time it's different. He really needs me."

Even as I said it, I could hear how hollow the justification sounded. How transparent. It was less an argument than an appeal, a feeble attempt to bridge the gap between the promise I'd broken and the loyalty that had driven me to break it.

But what I couldn't say—what I couldn't possibly explain—was that Paul's flight wasn't really about family issues or financial emergencies or any of the mundane crises that had brought him to our doorstep before. It was about portals that opened in walls and voices that spoke from other dimensions and the absolute certainty I'd developed, somewhere in the last twenty-four hours, that I was going to need my brother to see what I'd found. To confirm I wasn't losing my mind. To help me figure out what came next.

The real expense wasn't the plane ticket. It was the deception required to get him here under false pretences, the manipulation I'd deployed to overcome his resistance, the lies I was now compounding by letting Jamie believe this was about something as ordinary as family drama.

"Do I still have time to eat?"

Jamie's voice was clipped, each word carrying the sharp edge of anger barely contained. His movements had changed—the careful attention he usually poured into cooking, that almost artistic approach to plating and presentation, had evaporated. He slapped bacon onto toast with a roughness that made me wince, each motion telegraphing frustration more clearly than words could have.

"Of course," I replied, though my voice came out thin and strained, stretched beyond its comfortable range. I turned toward the cupboard, reaching for a plate with movements that felt artificially normal, as though the simple act of setting the table might restore some sense of routine to a morning that had lurched off its tracks.

But when I turned back, plate in hand, the kitchen was already reorganising itself around Jamie's departure. He'd swept his food away, taken possession of what should have been ours, his body language broadcasting that the sharing portion of breakfast had been cancelled without notice.

"Where's mine?" The question slipped out before I could stop it, surprise making me stupid.

"You don't get any." His answer was flat, unadorned, delivered without looking at me. He was focused on his plate, on the food he'd made for himself and himself alone, and watching him eat what should have been shared felt like taking a blow to the chest.

"Whatever," I muttered, the word tasting sour even as it left my lips.

I turned back to the stove, the hum of the hotplate filling the silence Jamie had created. Fine. I could cook my own breakfast. I'd been feeding myself since before we met, and I could certainly manage an egg.

Except the eggs had other ideas.

The first one cracked wrong, shell shards splintering into the pan, yolk rupturing on impact. Golden liquid spread outward in thin streams, mixing with the white in ways that couldn't be undone, the whole mess congealing into something that looked more like a crime scene than a meal. I fished out the shell fragments with my fingernails, burning myself in the process, and watched my breakfast transform into a flat, formless catastrophe against the heat.

A sigh tore free from my chest, heavier than any breakfast deserved to carry.

I can't even get my eggs right this morning.

The thought clung to me, bitter and recursive, echoing against the kitchen walls until it became about more than just food. This was about Paul, about Jamie, about the decisions I kept making that seemed right at the time and then twisted into complications I hadn't anticipated. The eggs hissed and darkened in the pan, and I couldn't escape the gnawing recognition that maybe inviting Paul hadn't been the smartest move. Maybe I should have found another way. Maybe I was making things worse by trying to make them better, the way I always seemed to do.

The morning's unravelling felt like a scale model of something larger—a diorama of the widening cracks in my life, each small failure reflecting bigger ones I didn't know how to address. And standing there, watching my breakfast burn, I found myself doubting not just my decisions but everything. Us. The fragile threads of whatever Jamie and I still were. Whether any of it could hold under the strain of what was coming.

"Right. I'm off then."

Jamie's voice cut through my spiralling thoughts, every syllable carrying the weight of things left unsaid. The clatter of his plate hitting the sink punctuated the announcement, ceramic against stainless steel, a sound that reverberated through the kitchen like an accusation. For a heartbeat I braced for the crash of something breaking, expecting the morning's tension to find release in shattered fragments across the tiles.

But the plate held. Somehow. As if it knew what I knew—that we were closer to breaking than we looked, but not quite there yet.

"Okay," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the stove. The ruined eggs had given up any pretence of becoming edible, their surfaces cratered and uneven, a visual metaphor for the conversation now ending behind me. I could feel Jamie's presence without looking—the physical weight of his frustration, the unspoken words piling up between us like snow on a roof that would eventually collapse. Confronting him would mean tearing open something I wasn't sure either of us knew how to close again. So I stayed where I was, hands busy, heart elsewhere.

And then he kissed me.

It came without warning—the soft brush of his lips against my cheek, unexpected and almost incongruous given everything that had just happened. A gesture so gentle it broke through the tension like unexpected sunlight finding its way through winter clouds. Not a grand reconciliation. Not even really an apology. Just a reminder, brief and undeniable, that beneath the irritation and the frayed tempers and the thousand small disappointments accumulating between us, something remained. A spark. Wounded but still flickering.

Before I could turn, before I could catch his eyes and try to read whatever message they might hold, he was gone. His departure was quiet, shadow-soft, the muted click of the front door carrying a finality that seemed too large for such a small sound.

I stood in the silence he'd left behind, the smell of burnt eggs mixing with the fading warmth of bacon, the ghost of his kiss still lingering on my cheek like a question I didn't have the courage to answer yet.

But I was smiling. Despite everything.

A decade. We'd built something across ten years that had included countless mornings like this one—storms rising and passing, tempers flaring and cooling, the thousand small collisions that happened when two people tried to share a life. There had been worse fights than this. Worse silences. Worse mornings where it felt like we were standing on opposite sides of a canyon that had opened overnight in the floor of our relationship.

And yet here we still were. Still cooking breakfast in the same kitchen. Still kissing goodbye even when goodbye felt more like a temporary armistice than a farewell. Still tethered to each other by something that had weathered a lot of weather and was still, somehow, standing.

The thought steadied me. Whatever I was carrying—whatever secrets I was keeping, whatever impossible truths I'd discovered in my study and confirmed in the small hours of the morning—Jamie and I had survived things before. We could survive this too. Maybe. If I was careful. If I found the right moment and the right words and the right way to show him what I'd found instead of just telling him.

Encouraged by the memory of his lips on my cheek, that unexpected tenderness that had arrived exactly when I'd needed it most, I reached for another egg.

This one I held more carefully, cradling it in my palm like something fragile and significant. The shell was smooth and cool against my skin, holding its potential in that particular way eggs have—ordinary object, extraordinary possibility. With deliberate gentleness, I tapped it against the edge of the pan.

The shell parted cleanly. The contents slid out in a golden arc, landing whole and unbroken among the waiting whites. The yolk held its shape, bright and intact, sitting there like a small sun in a sea of clouds.

A good sign, maybe. Or at least a less terrible one than its predecessor.

Perhaps today will turn out fine after all, I thought, letting the hope settle into me as I tended the pan.

With each turn of the spatula, I sent those hopes upward, silent offerings to whatever forces governed such things. For peace. For understanding. For the courage to tell the truth when the time came. For ten years of love to prove strong enough to survive whatever storms were still gathering on the horizon.

The egg cooked perfectly, its yolk staying whole, its edges crisping into exactly the texture I liked. I slid it onto toast, poured my coffee, and carried both to the table where Jamie should have been sitting.