He’s quiet for a moment, then he shifts and looks at me, cupping my cheek in his hand.
“You are good enough. You’re more than good enough. And whatever you’re scared of, whatever you’re not telling me, we’ll figure it out together. You just have to trust me.”
Together.
The word sits in my chest like a stone.
Because if I take this job in Switzerland, there will be no “together” anymore. There’d just be me alone, in a beautiful city, doing a prestigious job that my mother would have loved. There would be no more Wyatt with his blue eyes or Dolly with her big hair. There’d be no more Saturday morning gardening or cheesy karaoke songs.
If I stay, I’m giving up everything I was raised to want for something that may not even work out. Something that has no guarantees at all. Something that requires me to trust that this life, this wildly uncertain life, is worth choosing.
“Wyatt,” I say, my voice breaks on his name.
“Yeah?”
Tell him. Tell him now.
But I can’t. Not yet. Not tonight.
“Thank you,” I say instead. “For being here.”
“Always,” he says.
I hate myself for this lie growing between us.
But I’m not ready to face the truth yet.
So I lean into him and let myself have this moment, and pretend just for tonight that I don’t have an impossible choice to make.
The next five days are a slow kind of torture.
I go through the motions, opening the bar, serving drinks, smiling at customers, closing up at night. I garden with Meredith on Saturday morning. She watches me with those knowing eyes, but she never pushes. I have dinner with Wyatt on Sunday and laugh at his jokes, hold his hand, and pretend everything is normal.
But it’s not normal, and he knows it.
“You’re pulling away,” he says Sunday night, walking me to my door.
“No, I’m not.”
“You are. I can feel it.” He stops at the bottom of the stairs, not following me up like he usually does. “Whatever’s going on, Eleanor, whatever it is that you’re not telling me, it’s putting up a wall between us, and I don’t know how to get through it if you won’t let me in.”
My throat tightens like I’m being strangled.
“Wyatt—”
“I’m not asking you to tell me tonight,” he says gently. “But I need you to know that I see it, and it’s…” He stops for a moment. “It’s hard watching you disappear somewhere I can’t follow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just talk to me when you’re ready. Please.”
“I will.”
“October is almost here, Eleanor. If you’ve decided to leave, please don’t keep me in suspense.”
He leaves without kissing my cheek, without tucking my hair behind my ear, without any of our usual rituals. I stand at the bottom of the stairs and watch his taillights disappear down Mountain Road, feeling the distance growing between us with every passing second.
Monday morning, I draft another reply to Genevieve.
