“I’m sorry.” Miller set down her fork. “It’s been a long few weeks at work. I’m not great company tonight.”
“You’re fine.” Cara smiled, but there was something knowing in her eyes. “Though I’m getting the sense this might not be the right timing.”
Miller should have denied it. She should have rallied, tried harder, and given this a real chance. Cara was smart and kind, normally exactly her type, but she couldn’t make herself pretend anymore.
“I think you might be right,” Miller said quietly. “I’m sorry. That’s not fair to you.”
Cara studied her for a moment. “Someone else?”
Miller’s throat constricted as she managed a nod.
“Recent?”
“Recent enough.”
Cara reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Then you shouldn’t be here. You should be wherever she is.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It usually is.” Cara picked up her wine glass. “For what it's worth, whoever she is, I hope it works out. You seem like someone who deserves to be happy.”
Miller paid the check over Cara’s protests. They said goodbye on the sidewalk with a brief hug that felt like what it was: two strangers who would remain strangers. Then Cara walked toward her car and Miller walked toward hers and the night blanketed around her.
She sat in the driver’s seat without starting the engine yet. The parking lot was half-empty, the streetlights casting orange pools on the asphalt. Through the restaurant window, she could see their table being cleared, the evidence of the evening erased like it had never happened.
For three weeks, she’d told herself she’d get over it and the ache would fade. She believed that if she just kept moving forward, eventually she would stop feeling like she’d left something vital behind.
It wasn’t working.
Miller pressed her forehead against the steering wheel and sat in the silence, alone with the truth she’d been running from: she wasn’t going to get over Astoria. Not in three weeks, not in three months, maybe not ever.
She started the car and drove home through the empty streets, the radio off and the windows up.
Tomorrow, she’d go through the motions and try again, but tonight, she would let herself feel the full weight of what she had lost.
The next evening, Miller drove to the trailhead outside town.
She’d been here hundreds of times—the forest path that wound through Douglas firs and Western red cedars, the packed dirt trail that followed the ridge before looping back down toward the parking lot. It was four miles if she took the short route, seven if she pushed to the overlook. Tonight, she needed the seven.
The air was thick with the late July heat, the kind that didn’t break even after the sun dipped below the treeline. Millerstretched against her car, laced up her running shoes tighter than necessary, and started moving before her body was ready.
The first mile felt like a punishment. Her legs burned, her lungs protested, and sweat soaked through her tank top before she'd even reached the first switchback. She pushed harder anyway, her feet pounding against the dirt, trying to outrun the restlessness that had been crawling under her skin since last night.
The date, Cara’s knowing smile, the way she said, “You should be wherever she is.”
Miller forced herself to run faster.
The second mile blurred into the third. The trail climbed, and her thighs screamed. She welcomed it—the physical pain simpler than everything else, something she could measure and push through and eventually leave behind. A bird startled from the underbrush. Her breathing turned ragged. The trees pressed close on either side, the evening light filtering green and gold through the canopy.
She thought she could do this. Move on, find someone else, prove to herself that what she’d had with Astoria was just one chapter in a much longer story.
But sitting across from Cara last night, she’d felt the truth she’d been avoiding settle into her bones: therewasno moving on. There was no someone else. There was only this: the hollow ache that had taken up residence in her chest, the space that used to be filled with stolen hours and whispered conversations.
The trail crested at the overlook. Miller stopped, putting her hands on her knees as her lungs gasped for air. The valley spread out below her, the distant lights of Phoenix Ridge just starting to flicker on in the dusk. She'd stood here dozens of times, watching the sunset, feeling small in a way that was comforting.
Tonight, it just felt empty.
She sank down onto a boulder at the trail’s edge, her legs shaking from the excruciating climb and the sweat cooling on skin. The forest sounds crept back in: birds settling, insects humming, the rustle of wind through branches.
