There weren't that many things that could get Amelia out of bed early on a Monday morning, but good coffee was one of them.

She'd made the somewhat spur-of-the-moment decision the prior afternoon to start the week off right by meeting up with Henry and Liam for coffee this morning before they all had to get to work. Granted, Henry had to show up to his job tragically early—a solid forty-five minutes earlier than Amelia and Liam did—so he'd probably just be taking his to-go. Still, she couldn't think of a much better beginning to her morning than sneaking in a few minutes with her boyfriend and drinking a massive pumpkin spice latte.

She didn't care how basic it was. She only got to enjoy them for a few months out of the year, so she was taking advantage of it while she could.

She wasn't running late and yet when she pulled up into a parking space in front of the coffee shop, Amelia saw that Henry and Liam had both beaten her there. The weather was just mild enough that they'd waited outside for her, lingering close enough to the door to be easily spotted but not so close as to be in anyone's way while they chatted about whatever in the world men talked about first thing in the morning.

Henry pressed a soft kiss onto her temple before they walked inside. The shop was far from empty, but she'd also seen much worse on a workday morning and they still managed to get through the line and order their drinks fairly quickly. Since Amelia and Liam would still have a few minutes to stick around once they got their coffees, the three of them went ahead and found themselves a table, tucked away in one of the corners and slightly more secluded from the bulk of the noise—from the hustle and bustle of coffee grinders running and steam wands hissing and order numbers being called out while all of the patrons talked amongst themselves.

She had just seen Henry, of course, but a few weeks had already managed to slip away since Amelia last spoke to Liam on Halloween. He'd seemed to be in decent mental shape then and she was glad to see that he didn't appear to have slipped back into a state of total despair. She thought all three of them were improving at accepting that life needed to be taken one day at a time right now. Sink or swim, she supposed—they didn't have a choice but to find ways to cope.

Predictably, it took just long enough for their drinks to be prepared that Henry needed to get going pretty much immediately. At least he was going off to a job that he genuinely liked—the past two months might have been infinitely worse if his best form of distraction was something he also happened to hate. He gave her one more last swift kiss on the cheek (which was about as much PDA as either of them wanted to subject anyone else to witnessing) before he had to go.

She wished he didn't have to leave so soon, of course, but she was equally content to get to hang out with Liam for a few more minutes. He was an easy person to spend time with, gentle in his demeanor even if he was slightly reserved by nature. If Amelia had been going through what he was, she certainly would have wanted to safeguard her feelings too.

"You seem like you're doing well," he told her, which surprised her even though she could have said the same thing to him.

"How so?"

"Sorry, did that sound weird? I just mean that you don't seem stressed, that's all."

"Oh," she nodded. "No, it's not weird—I just wasn't thinking that I seemed any different. But I did get some stressful stuff out of the way this weekend. I finally introduced Henry to my parents."

"Ah."

"I wasn't stressed about him," she clarified. "You know Henry; he's just about as good of a boyfriend as anyone could ask for."

Liam nodded. "...But your parents?" he guessed.

Maybe she should have felt odd talking to him about the complications of relationships right after her boyfriend had just been sitting right there at the table with them, but this wasn't really about Henry. And Liam had already been quite open with her about some of his own feelings, so the conversation seemed to flow naturally.

"Yeah, my parents," she agreed, her gaze quickly flitting around to make sure there was no one else in near enough proximity that they would overhear her as long as she spoke softly enough. "Well, not even them, really. I mean, I wasn't thinking too much about their personalities clashing or anything. I was just...right before Henry, I was in a relationship with a guy who hurt me in a lot of ways and that wound up with me ending it really abruptly. And I hid all of it from my parents, so they still don't really understand why I did that. I've been pretty nervous about them questioning my decision to move on."

Her eyes had continued to wander while she talked, but once they came back to Liam, she realized that he had started to look slightly...uneasy. Had she struck a nerve, or did he just not want to hear about this?

"You okay?" she asked quietly. "Am I way oversharing?"

"Yeah, I'm okay," he swallowed. "I just—I kinda get what you're saying."

When he was silent for a second, it hit her that he was doing the exact same thing she had a moment before: scanning their surroundings to make sure no one else would hear him.

"Right before I met Natasha, I was dating someone who...well, who was honestly a horrible person," he elaborated. "I did a lot of stupid stuff back then, hung around people who didn't actually care about me at all. I was dating this girl and it had never felt like it was working, really, but I idolized her too much to let her go and I knew that all of the mutual friends we had were going to choose her over me if we broke up. So I stayed with her longer—a lot longer—than I ever should have."

Amelia's lips barely parted as she mumbled, "I did that, too."

"We disagreed over practically everything, but it eventually escalated to a point where she was constantly judging me. I think she'd been harboring all of this resentment towards me and didn't know how to communicate it, so it just festered for way too long. She'd escalate our arguments into these really loud, aggressive fights. And there was never anything I could do to make it better or calm her down. I felt like I could never do anything right at all."

Amelia felt like there was something hot pressing against the inside of her stomach, her lungs. She never would have expected him to have gone through that, but as she looked at him now, it wasn't hard to recall what she'd noticed about him at Halloween, that he seemed to have some old pain that had messed with his head even before all of this with Lily. And he'd told her point-blank that Nat had helped him through a really difficult time in his life...

Maybe the two of them had much more in common than they'd realized.

"Then we're at this party one night," Liam continued, the volume of his voice even fainter than it had been before. "And I shouldn't have gone in the first place because I knew she'd probably start something. But of course, I do it anyway, like any other stupid eighteen-year-old would have, I guess. I end up being literally the only one in the room who's not wasted and she starts arguing with me again."

Amelia set her coffee cup down, feeling as wired as if she'd already drank three of them. She wouldn't have asked him to continue if he hadn't already offered up this much of his story entirely of his own accord, but now that they were here...

"What happened?"

"What happened," he said dryly. "Was that she decided to throw whatever happened to be in her hand at that current moment at me. And that happened to be a bottle of Bud Light."

"A glass bottle?"

She was whispering, but her heart lurched against her ribcage at the thought of anyone else in her life having to endure anything remotely similar to what she'd experienced with Colton. Much less as a teenager. She couldn't imagine how infinitely lost she would have felt if it'd happened when she was that young, how scared.

"She had terrible aim; it shattered on the counter next to me instead. One of the pieces nicked me pretty well, though."

He adjusted the cuff of his shirtsleeve just enough to expose a thin white scar on his wrist, about a centimeter long. She couldn't completely stop her brain from torturing her by envisioning that piece of brown glass that must have wedged itself into his arm, how the alcohol must have made it burn. It couldn't have been a super shallow cut if he still had a scar from it.

After a second, she managed to speak. "I'm...I don't know what to say other than I'm so sorry that happened to you."

It was probably a lousy consolation, but he didn't seem bothered—in fact, he'd never strayed very far from calm in the first place.

"It was a long time ago," he said, as if he'd read her mind and wanted to explain the almost unsettling neutrality with which he spoke. "I've made my peace with it as well as I can. My point in saying any of that is that I get how hard it is to get your thoughts in line after something like that. I honestly don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't serendipitously run into Nat right after it happened. She's pretty good at distinguishing your bullshit from what's actually worth being upset about."

Despite the mood being so serious a second ago, Amelia couldn't help but giggle a little bit at that comment. "Yeah, she is. Is that what you were talking about when she came to pick me up from Henry's place? You said something about her always showing up in your life when it was at its worst."

Liam nodded. "I'm afraid I don't have the best track record with her."

But it all made so much more sense in Amelia's head now. He and Nat were both such level-headed people that she sometimes couldn't help but wonder what hadn't worked between them, but now she could see why Liam would have been in a vastly different state of mind back then. He probably hadn't been in a good state to be dating anyone right after that.

Then again, she could say the same thing about herself.

But to her own surprise, that thought didn't make her feel guilty for dragging Henry along through her emotional turmoil. On the contrary, she felt hope for their future.

Because sitting right across from her now was someone who could help her in a way that Henry simply couldn't.

"That girl you were with—how did you stop yourself from thinking about her all the time? I'm honestly pretty lost with my own situation, and we both know Henry doesn't deserve that..."

"Let's remove Henry from the equation for a second," Liam suggested, straightforwardly but not unkindly. "Even if you weren't in another relationship right now, you don't deserve that either. But without knowing the specifics—which I'm not going to make you tell me because it's way different when it's fresh than when it happened years ago—I guess my best piece of advice is that we can't get rid of shitty people. We just can't. So to spend a ton of time just seething and wishing they didn't exist is going to hurt you more than it'll help. It's not worth wasting your emotions on people like that if you can help it at all."

Her mouth felt dry; she took another sip of her coffee as she gently nodded her acknowledgment. He had always come across to her as someone wiser than his years, someone who had seen a lot, but she'd made the reasonable yet blind assumption that the majority of that was directly related to the gaping loss at the center of his life currently. There was so much more experience, so much more life lived all swirling around in that mind of his than she'd given him credit for.

"And if you ever run into him again," he added a little more gingerly, gauging her expression. "Don't give him a minute of your time, okay? I wish someone had been there to tell me that."

"I already made that mistake," she confessed under her breath, her gaze glued to the table. "I won't be making it again."

"Good," he said softly. "...Is it too much of me to ask if Henry knows about any of this? If I'm overstepping, just say so."

"He does," Amelia assured him. She knew the two of them wanted to look out for each other; she didn't begrudge him for that. "He knows about most of it. There's some stuff that I'm just...I don't feel ready to talk about it yet."

"Don't push yourself too hard, okay?"

"Okay," Amelia agreed. "...Can I give you a hug?"

Liam grinned, and that smile gave her hope for both of them, for their happiness and their futures. "Only since you asked so politely."