Joey was in the Kavanagh living room, sprawled on the couch with a half-dead phone in his hand and Top Gear droning in the background, when it buzzed. Once.

He glanced down. A single message. Her name.

His thumb froze over the screen, tension tightening across his chest.

They hadn’t spoken directly in weeks — not since she ended it. Quietly. Kindly. With tears she tried to hide and a voice that shook when she said “I can’t be in a relationship when I’m barely holding myself together.”

He respected it. He got it.

He just hadn’t figured out how to stop loving her anyway.

And now—

“You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.” — Fleetwood Mac

Joey stared at the words. Felt the world slow under them.

He’d seen her around Tommen a few times since. Headphones in, eyes down. She always smiled — but not at him. Not like before.

He told himself he was fine. Even flirted with a girl last week just to prove it. But then he went home and didn’t text anyone back for three days.

Now, this.

He read the line again. That lyric, from the song she made him listen to on her mum’s old record player one rainy afternoon. When they lay tangled on her bedroom floor, laughing and loving and pretending they had forever.

Joey swallowed, the ache swelling sharp in his throat.

She was still in there. Somewhere beneath the distance and the silence and the heartbreak she never wanted to cause.

He didn’t text back. Not yet.

He just hit play on the song, leaned back, and let her voice — the real one, the remembered one — echo in his chest, singing all the things they never got to say.

And Joey Lynch, for once, didn’t try to bury what he felt.