I look down at my coffee. “No.”
“Then it stays.”
Silence falls again, this time heavier in a different way.
I fiddle with my straw. “Why haven’t you married anyone?”
He turns his head slowly, like he wasn’t expecting the question to jump from my brain to my mouth that fast.
“No easing into it, huh?” he says.
“I’m not great at easing,” I admit. “But you’re… you.” I gesture at all of him. “You’re good-looking and competent and your family’s… loud. You’ve been home for a while now. There must have been… options.”
“There were,” he says.
“And yet…” I lift my brows.
He watches me for a long heartbeat, eyes searching my face like he’s deciding how much to give.
Then he huffs out a breath and sits back.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he says.
My stomach flips. “Not to me.”
“It was always you, Laney.”
The simple honesty of it knocks the air right out of my lungs.
He holds my gaze, no flinch, no joke to soften it. “I didn’t marry anyone because I didn’t want anyone else. I tried.” A rough laugh. “Went on a couple of dates. Had some almost-somethings. But every time it got close to real, all I could think was ‘she’s not you.’ Which isn’t fair to them. Or you. Or me, if we’re counting.”
My throat burns.
I didn’t come prepared for this.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” I whisper.
“You don’t have to do anything,” he says gently. “I’m not dropping it in your lap like a proposal. I’m just answering your question.”
He looks away finally, eyes scanning the street like he’s giving me space even as his words sit between us like a living thing.
“I broke things back then,” he says. “I made choices for both of us. I’m not asking you to forget that. Just… it’s the reason I’m still single. That’s all.”
That’s all, he says, like he didn’t just put my entire teenage heart on the table and slide it back to me.
I sip my coffee to have something to do with my hands. It tastes like melted ice and confusion.
The truth is, I’ve been comparing, too.
Every date in the city, every almost-kiss in a bar with a nice safe stranger—I held them up in my head against a boy on a dock who carved initials into wood and promisedalways.
“Okay,” I say eventually.
“Okay?” he echoes.
“I hear you.”
He nods like that’s more than he expected and less than he hoped.
