So, I ran.
And if it was up to me, I'd run forever.
And never come back.
18
JOY
By five o’clock, the shop was spotless.
Every stem trimmed. Every ribbon cut clean. Every surface wiped until it gleamed like order itself might keep the world from tilting any further off its axis.
It didn’t.
The arrangements for the event had gone out on time. Britney had hugged me before leaving, babbling about how incredible everything looked, how I was a lifesaver, how lucky the clients were to have me.
I smiled. I nodded. I locked up.
And still, Micah hadn’t answered.
Not my call.
Not my text.
Not the second call I pretended wasn’t panic.
The street outside hummed with early evening Charleston—tourists wandering, couples lingering, the slow slide toward dinner reservations and twilight. Normally, I loved this hour. The moment when the city softened and everything felt possible again.
Tonight, it felt hollow.
Not empty—wrong. Like the city had lost its depth and I was moving through a backdrop instead of a place I belonged. The familiar rhythm of Charleston, the thing that usually grounded me, slid right past without catching.
I stood on the sidewalk with my keys clenched in my hand and did something I almost never did.
I stopped trying to reason my way out of what I felt.
I listened to my body instead of my plans.
That alone felt dangerous.
Because my plans were careful. Measured. Built from years of learning how not to tip the balance of my life too far in any one direction. Plans kept me safe. Plans kept me recognizable to myself.
But my body didn’t recognize safety the same way anymore.
It had been awake for a short time, and already it had learned something my mind was struggling to accept: I was no longer standing on the edge of change.
I was already in it.
There was no going back to the version of the day where Micah was a man I wondered about instead of a man I worried over. No returning to the woman who went home, locked her door, and trusted that waiting was the same thing as wisdom.
That world had slipped sideways without asking my permission.
And standing there, keys biting into my palm, I realized something quietly terrifying and oddly steadying at the same time?—
If I was already in a strange new world, already breaking rules I used to live by, already letting attachment rewrite my instincts …
Then maybe the bravest thing wasn’t to retreat.
