"I didn't walk away from you," I say, the words sharp now, too fast to soften. "I walked away from everything."
"You walked away without saying a damn thing," he fires back. "One morning you were there, and the next—" He laughs once, humorless. "Nothing. No explanation. No call. No goodbye."
My chest tightens. "You didn't ask me to stay."
The words land hard.
His eyes flash. "Because I shouldn't have had to."
I take a step closer before I can stop myself. "You don't get to rewrite that. You never said it out loud. You never told me you wanted me to choose you."
My pulse roars in my ears. The shed feels smaller, the walls pressing in as the rain hammers harder overhead.
"You don't know what it felt like," I continue, voice rising despite myself. "To wake up every day and feel like the ground had dropped out from under me. To breathe and still feel like I was suffocating."
He steps closer too now, matching me, the space between us shrinking to inches. "I was there."
"No," I snap. "You were solid. You were rooted. You had direction. I had grief wrapped around my throat and no idea who I was without my dad."
His mouth opens, then closes.
I don't stop.
"Staying felt like choosing one life forever," I say, the words spilling now, sharp and shaking. "And I was twenty-two and drowning. Everything felt permanent and I was breaking. You felt like a cage because you were steady when I wasn't."
The second the word leaves my mouth, I regret it.
His face hardens. Something shutters behind his eyes, like I just confirmed every fear he's been carrying for five years.
"A cage," he repeats quietly. Flatly.
I swallow. "That'snot—"
"That's exactly what you meant," he says. "You fucked me and left because staying felt like a trap."
There it is. After all these weeks, he’s finally said it. The big issue between us. The thing that broke us apart.
"That is not what happened."
"Then tell me what did," he demands, voice rising now, echoing off the metal walls. "Because from where I was standing, you took everything I had to give and disappeared."
My throat burns.
I remember the morning light through the window. The way his arm had been heavy and warm across my waist. The way panic had crawled up my spine the second I woke up and realized how much that moment meant.
How much it could cost me. How much it changed things.
"I was young," I say, quieter now but no less firm. "And scared. And grieving. And you felt like my forever when I couldn't even survive the day. I wanted you so badly it terrified me."
The silence that follows is thick and volatile.
His eyes close. Just for a second.
When they open, the restraint is gone.
"I'm done pretending," he breathes. "That I still don't want you. That I ever fucking stopped."
He lurches forward, his hand fists in my wet shirt and pulls before I can even think.
