I’d never pulled into the lot.
My hands were still shaking when I put the car in park.
I didn’t know what I was going to say. Didn’t know if he’d even want to hear it. Maybe I’d waited too long. Maybe the silence had said everything. Maybe he’d already decided that a woman who couldn’t choose him when it mattered wasn’t worth choosing back.
But I was done letting fear make my decisions for me.
I got out of the car.
Walked toward the station doors.
The baby kicked again—a small flutter, like she approved.
CHAPTER 16
Owen
Three days.
Seventy-two hours since I walked out of Grace’s kitchen. Since I said the words I’d been carrying for years and watched her face go still. Since I packed my things from the carriage house and drove away without looking back.
I’d been looking back my whole life. I was done.
The station was quiet in the predawn dark. B-shift sleeping, the building settling into that particular silence between calls. I’d been awake for hours. Sleep came in fragments now—shallow and restless, broken by dreams I didn’t want to remember.
I grabbed my coffee and slipped out the back entrance, the way I had every morning since I got here. The tailgate of my truck was cold through my jeans. The coffee was bitter, the way I’d started making it since I stopped drinking Grace’s. No point pretending I liked it sweet when the only reason I’d tolerated it was her.
The sky was just starting to lighten along the ridge. Purple bleeding into gray. The mountains were black shapes against it, familiar as my own hands.
I used to watch this sunrise from the B&B porch.
The thought came before I could stop it. Saturday mornings. Grace was beside me in the quiet before the guests woke up. The smell of cinnamon rolls drifted through the screen door. The easy silence of two people who’d known each other long enough that talking wasn’t required.
I missed her.
The admission sat heavily in my chest. I’d told myself I was done. That walking away was the right thing—the brave thing. The thing I should have done years ago instead of hovering on the edges of her life like some kind of ghost.
But missing her wasn’t something I could decide to stop.
I stared at the coffee going cold in my hands and asked myself the question I’d been avoiding.
Did I do the right thing?
I told her I loved her. Told her I couldn’t keep pretending. Told her that if she wanted me—really wanted me—she’d have to come find me.
She hadn’t.
Three days, and nothing. No call. No text. No Grace appearing in the station doorway with some excuse about a loose hinge or a broken step.
Maybe that was my answer. Maybe silence was its own kind of choice.
I thought about my father. The way he used to say that showing up was ninety percent of everything. I’d built my whole life on that philosophy. I was there for the crew, for the calls, for Grace. I kept coming back, kept standing in the same places, until I’d worn a groove in the floor of my own wanting.
And where had it gotten me?
Sitting on a tailgate at five in the morning, alone, wondering if love was something you could earn—or just something that happened to other people.
Sarah’s voice echoed in my head.Too safe. Too predictable. Nothing could ever surprise you.
