The name landed between us. I watched him absorb it—the tightening of his jaw, the quick flash behind his eyes.
"What did she say?"
"She said you'll choose work over me. That you always do. That she spent fifteen years waiting for you to show up and you never did." I wrapped my arms around myself—cold, or self-defense, or both. "She said I deserve to be someone's priority. Not someone's margin note."
"And you believe her."
"I don't want to believe her."
"But you do."
"I have no idea what I believe!" The volume surprised us both. I pressed my palms to my forehead, took a breath. "I know what I've seen, Callum. I've seen you choose me. I've seen you take a Saturday off and eat street food and play the piano and be present. But she had fifteen years with you. Fifteen years. And she's telling me it doesn't last. That the version of you I'm getting is temporary."
"Jessica is projecting her own experience onto?—"
"Is she wrong?"
He stopped.
"Is she wrong?" I repeated. "You've had the Riverside contract for three hours and you're already planning your next move. You were checking emails during dessert—don't think I didn't notice. You had drawings on your desk that you hid from me. And now the arrangement is—" My voice cracked. I swallowed it. "The arrangement is done, Callum. You got the contract. That's what this was for. So where does that leave me?"
"This stopped being about the arrangement weeks ago and you know it."
"Do I? How would I know that? You haven't said it. You haven't told me what I am to you outside of the deal."
He was quiet. The silence stretched. And in thatsilence, I felt the familiar, devastating pull of a pattern I'd been running since Devon—the part where I needed a man to tell me I mattered and the man couldn't find the right combination of syllables to do it.
"I'm scared," I said. "I'm scared that I did the thing I always do. I picked a man who needed me for a season and now the season's over and I'm standing in a parking lot in a borrowed dress wondering if I was ever more than convenient."
His face changed. I watched the walls go up in real time—brick by brick, mortared with the same emotional concrete he'd been mixing for twenty years. The open, vulnerable man who kissed my shoulder and played piano at midnight was disappearing behind the architect.
"You were never convenient," he said. Low. Strained.
"Then tell me what I was. What I am. Use actual sentences, Callum. Tell me."
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
Opened it again.
“Clearly you believe my feelings hinged solely on the arrangement between us. If you can’t tell that my feelings were real, nothing I can say will change that and I won’t beg for your affection. The arrangement is now over," he said. "You're free to move on."
Ten syllables that gutted me.
Not angry. Not cruel. Delivered with the cold calm of a man performing an operation on himself—cutting out the thing he wanted most so he wouldn't have to watch it die on its own.
I knew what he was doing. I knew he was running. I knew this was the pattern Elena had warned me about, the one Jessica had mapped in detail, the retreat into safety when the risk got too real.
I knew all of that, and it didn't matter, not one single bit, standing in a parking lot with my arms wrapped around myself and the man I loved telling me I was free to go.
"Okay," I said.
His expression flickered. He hadn't expected that. He'd expected a fight—more yelling, more pushing, a confrontation that would let him feel justified in his retreat.
I didn't give him one.
"Okay," I said again. "I'll get my stuff from the apartment tomorrow."
I pulled out my phone. Opened Mika's contact. Typed three letters.
