“Owen—”
“You should go.”
She stood. Hesitated. Took a step toward me, then stopped. “I really am sorry.”
“I know.”
She left. The door clicked shut behind her. The apartment went quiet in that particular way that only happens when someone who used to fill a space is suddenly gone.
I sat on the edge of the couch. Stared at the counter where, in the back of the junk drawer, a ring box had been waiting for three months. I thought I’d ask her at Christmas, in front of the tree, the way she’d mentioned once that her father had proposed to her mother.
I’d been so close. So ready to ask her to choose me.
Instead, I was sitting in the wreckage of another relationship that ended the same way: me showing up, them walking away.
I sat there and let the grief move through me the way I did after bad calls. Grief didn’t care if you were ready for it. You couldn’t fight it. You could only wait for it to pass.
Maybe this was just who I was. The one who got left. The one who loved too carefully, too thoroughly, too predictably. Three women now, and the pattern was the same every time.
I made myself available, reliable, and safe. I made myself easy to have. And then, I made myself easy to leave.
The worst part was that Sarah wasn’t wrong. I could feel it in my own chest how I wasn’t surprised. Even this—even losing her—felt somehow inevitable. Like I’d always known itwould end this way. Like I’d been waiting for permission to stop pretending.
Maybe love wasn’t enough. Maybe showing up wasn’t enough. Maybe I’d built my whole life on a philosophy that only worked if someone showed up for you too.
Saturday meant the B&B.
I almost canceled. Grace didn't need my mess. She had a business to run, guests to feed, and a life that didn't include managing my feelings about another failed relationship. But I got in my truck anyway, because routine was how I stayed upright. Routine was the thing I could hold onto when everything else slipped out of reach.
The drive to Mountain View took twenty minutes through winding roads, past farms that had been there longer than the town itself. I'd been making this drive since I was eighteen. First with my mom, then alone after she died, then because it was Saturday, the way it always was.
Sixteen years. Grace and I had been doing this for all that time.
The B&B appeared around the last bend: a white Victorian with a wraparound porch, flower boxes in the windows, smoke curling from the kitchen chimney. Grace's grandmother had built it in the seventies. Grace had inherited it at twenty-two, the same year I started at the station. We'd grown up together in a way. I was learning how to run into burning buildings. She was learning how to keep a hundred-year-old house from falling down.
I parked in my usual spot and let myself in through the kitchen door.
The smell hit me before I was fully inside. Cinnamon rolls. Warm and sweet, the scent threaded through me like a memory. Grace made them from her grandmother's recipe, the same one she'd been making every Saturday since I could remember.
“You're early.”
Grace didn't look up from the dough she was kneading. Flour dusted her hands, her apron, a streak of it across her cheek. Her dark hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she was humming something under her breath—that old Carole King song her grandmother used to play.
“Couldn't sleep.”
“Coffee's on. Cups are where they always are.”
I poured myself a mug and leaned against the counter. The kitchen was warm, familiar, and the chaos of breakfast prep spread across every surface. This was Grace's domain. She moved through it like water, reaching for things without looking, timing everything by instinct rather than timers.
She glanced up at me, and her hands stilled.
“Rough shift?”
I took a long sip of coffee. Too sweet, the way she always made it. It hit against something bitter I hadn’t managed to swallow yet.
“Something like that.”
Grace studied me for a moment, then went back to her dough. But something in her posture shifted. Her attention sharpened the way it always did when she sensed someone needed space to talk.
