We’re both broken. We’re both scared.
The question is whether we’re brave enough to be broken and scared together.
I pull out my phone and start composing a text to Finn. Delete it. Start again. Delete that too.
What would I even say?I know you told me to leave, but I’m not going anywhere?That sounds like the setup to a restraining order.I love you and I think you love me too?He already knows that. It didn’t change anything.
I set my phone down and stare at the ceiling.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll check out of this hotel, drive back to Denver, and try to pretend the last three days were just a strange dream. A beautiful, painful dream that I’ll probably never fully wake up from.
I pull up my calendar app and look at next week. Blog posts to write. A meeting with a potential sponsor for the channel. Lunch with my mom, who’s been trying to set me up with her dentist’s son. Normal life. The life I had before I drove up a mountain and found everything I didn’t know I was looking for.
How am I supposed to go back to that? How am I supposed to film cooking videos in my Denver kitchen when all I’ll be able to think about is his kitchen, with its handmade cabinets and the way the morning light streamed through the windows?
How am I supposed to date anyone else when I’ve been looked at the way Finn looked at me? When I know what it feels like to be seen—really seen—not as too much or not enough, but as exactly right?
I can’t. But I’ll have to try.
I think about the woman I was three days ago. Nervous, hopeful, cooking short ribs for a blind date with a man I’d never met. I think about everything that’s happened since—the wrong cabin, the storm, the man who made me feel more seen in seventy-two hours than my ex-husband did in three years.
I’m not the same person who drove up that mountain.
And maybe that’s the point. Maybe Finn changed something in me that can’t be unchanged. Maybe loving him—even if he’s too scared to love me back—has taught me something about my own courage. About my worth. About what I deserve.
I deserve someone who fights for me. Someone who chooses me even when it’s terrifying. Someone who doesn’t let fear win.
And if Finn can’t be that person, then I need to let him go.
Are you going to let fear win?
The question hangs in the air, but I already know the answer. I’m not going to let fear win. I’m going to go home, throw myself into my work, and slowly—painfully—move on. Not because I want to, but because staying here, pining for someone who won’t choose me, would be letting fear win in a different way. Fear of being alone. Fear of starting over. Fear of admitting that sometimes love isn’t enough.
I close my eyes and let exhaustion pull me under. Tomorrow I’ll drive away from these mountains. Tomorrow I’ll start the process of forgetting. Tomorrow I’ll begin learning how to live with a heart that’s broken in an entirely new way—not from cruelty this time, but from love that wasn’t brave enough to fight for itself.
Tonight, I just let myself grieve.
For what we had. For what we could have been. For the life I glimpsed in that ranger station—cooking in his kitchen, waking in his arms, building something beautiful out of two broken people’s pieces.
Tomorrow I’ll be strong. Tonight, I let myself shatter.
Because sometimes loving someone means letting them go, even when every cell in your body screams to hold on.
Even when you know they’re making the wrong choice.
Even when walking away feels like leaving half your soul on a mountain with a man too afraid to claim it.
Chapter 15
FINN
I don’t sleep.
The bed smells like her—vanilla and something warm I can’t name—and every time I close my eyes, I see her face. The way she looked at me when I told her to leave. The tears on her cheeks. The hope dying in her eyes as she realized I wasn’t going to fight for us.
Around 3 AM, I give up and move to the couch. It doesn’t help. She slept here too. I can see the indent where her head rested, the blanket I covered her with that first night still draped over the arm.
The ranger station has never felt so empty.
