My body tenses as I hear Archie’s name. I came here to be alone, to stand in the cold and not think about him, and now he’s behind me and saying my name. I don’t know what to do with the hope and frustration that flood through me.
I can’t push down the wild, stupid hope that somehow this can work out. Yet, somehow, he’s found me in my favorite place. I don’t know yet if that makes it better or worse.
“How did you find me?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
“I read it in your Substack.” A pause. “You wrote about this bridge. About coming here when you wanted to get away from things and think.”
The words land one at a time. He read my Substack. And heremembered.
I turn then, and he’s standing under a lamppost, hands in his jacket pockets, and even in the dim evening light, I can see the shadows under his eyes.
“You read my essays?” I ask. I assumed he looked at one or two videos, and that was it.
“All of them.” He doesn’t move closer.
“You read everything I wrote, but you couldn’t write me one text before you walked out of that Conservatory?” I ask, and my body warms as anger rushes through me. How could someone care enough to read my Substack, especially that old post about this bridge, and then just ghost me so badly?
His jaw tightens, and he reaches up and roughly rubs his neck. “I know,” he says. “I know.”
“You left me in the Conservatory.” My voice shakes, and I hate it, but I keep going. “With my dress around my waist, when I could still feel your hands on my skin. You said you had to go, and you were gone before I understood what was happening. You said it was work, but I didn’t think a week would go by without hearing from you. Not after what we shared in the Conservatory. It’s been days of nothing, Archie.”
He doesn’t flinch or look away. “I got called out for work.” He exhales. “Tessa, I work in private security. Executive protection—high-profile clients, threat assessment, the kind of work where you don’t get to say no when the phone rings. A client’s security was compromised, and I was on call. When a job goes active, personal devices get locked down. No contact outside the team. I’ve been out of town on assignment, with no way to reach you. I haven’t even been home. When I got my phone and saw your new video, I felt like the worst asshole in the history of the world. I rushed to find you as soon as I could leave the office.”
I stare at him, my mind processing everything he’s saying. “You could have told me before you left.”
“I’m truly sorry. I’m not used to having to explain this. What happened that night…I wasn’t expecting it. But on my life, Tessa, I’ve thought of nothing else since then. I hate that I hurt you.”
“You could have texted from the car.” I understand it was a work emergency, but how long would it have taken him to send meanything?
“When we get calls like this, we have to drop everything. I was immediately on the phone with my boss, getting details for the assignment, then my personal phone was taken for security, and I was given a work burner. We can’t use company phones for anything personal, not even sending an email.”
“I spent five days thinking I invented you,” I say quietly. “Everything you said in the Conservatory—I thought I made it all up.”
“It was real.” His voice cracks on the second word. “Every word of it.”
He crosses the distance between us in three steps—not touching me, but close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him in the cold air and see the stress creasing his forehead.
“It wasn’t easy.” He grips the railing beside my hand, an inch of cold metal between his fingers and mine. “I need to tell you something. This isn’t an excuse.”
“Her name was Rachael,”he says, looking at the water instead of me. “We were together for two years. I was going to propose—had the ring, had a plan.”
My throat tightens.
“She didn’t wait.” His fingers flex on the railing. “I was on a Heartline job—two weeks, full lockdown, same protocols. She knew all about what I do and how I can be unreachable for days or weeks at a time. When I got back, the apartment was empty. She’d left with a guy she met at the dog park. Two years, and she didn’t even leave a letter.”
“Archie...”
He pauses. “It trained me to do exactly what I did to you—when the crisis call comes, everything personal gets locked in a box. Mission first. Feelings later. Except later never comes.”
“It’s an explanation,” I say. “And I’m glad you told me. But Rachael was your past. I’m standing here now. I need to know that the next time your phone rings, you won’t disappear and leave me wondering if I hallucinated the whole thing.”
“I won’t.”
“Can I really believe that?” It hurts to ask this question when it’s clear he’s suffering, too.
“I know.” He turns to face me fully. “I’m not asking you to trust the words. I’m asking you to let me prove it.”
The wind catches my hair, whipping it across my face. Before I can push it back, his hand is there—tucking the strand behind my ear, fingers barely brushing my jaw. The touch is so gentle after all this rawness that my eyes sting.
