I put my phone down.
I stood in my kitchen and looked around. Jamie showed up everywhere I looked. The green mug in the cupboard I'd bought without consciously deciding, the same size and weight as the blue one in Jamie's kitchen. The coffee that I didn't drink. The sparkling water that appeared in my fridge the way Jamie appeared in every space he occupied.
I was going to tell him in person. That was the plan. I owed him an honest, face-to-face conversation, because this would change both our lives. I owed him that.
I owed him more than that, but this was what I had.
Except I kept coming back to Kieran's words.He's never going to ask. That's not how he's built.I kept coming back to the look on Jamie's face in the hotel room, and to the coffee shop where he'd said,Whatever you decide, we're good,with the voice of a man who was being destroyed by his own generosity.
I'd accepted the trade because Jamie didn't ask me not to.
And sitting in my apartment, waiting for the buzzer, I understood with complete clarity that this was the stupidest decision I had ever made.
Not because Denver was wrong. Denver was right—professionally, financially—in every measurable way. But I hadn't made the decision based on measurement, I'd made it based on the absence of permission I'd been waiting for, the one word from Jamie that would have changed the equation. I'd made it because the man I loved hadn't fought for me, and I'd taken that as evidence that there was nothing to fight for.
But I'd seen his face.
His face said everything, suspended in that second before the phone rang. He'd lost his ability to pretend, and what was underneath was so clear and unmistakable that I'd carried it in my chest for weeks like a second heartbeat.
I'd accepted the trade. The paperwork was filed.
I sat on my couch and waited.
The buzzer sounded. I crossed to the intercom, pressed the button, and unlocked the building door. The footsteps in the hallway were fast—faster than Jamie's usual unhurried pace. He was almost running.
I opened the apartment door.
He was standing in the hallway wearing jeans and a jacket he'd thrown on in a hurry. His hair was a mess from his hands running through it. It was a stress gesture I'd never seen him make before tonight.
He looked like a man who'd run out of ways to be fine.
His eyes were bright—not with tears, but with the intensity of having made a decision without having time to build the performance around it. His jaw was set.
"Don't go," he said.
Just two words, raw and direct, stripped of everything.
Don't go.
I stood in the doorway of my apartment and looked at Jamie Hayes. He'd spent his entire life taking care of everyone and asking for nothing.
Now he was asking for something for the first time—standing in the hallway in a jacket he'd thrown on in a hurry, with his hair a mess and his composure gone, his face baring all. The wanting, the fear, the desperate hope of a man who had finally decided to reach for what he wanted.
"I saw your face," I said, "in the hotel room before I answered the phone."
He went still. "I know."
"You weren't going to say anything."
"No."
"Why not?"
He took a breath. "Because I was okay. I had you and that was— It was enough. Having you in my life, in whatever form, at whatever distance, that was enough. I made my peace withit years ago. And then you were leaving and—all of a sudden, it wasn't enough."
"When?"
"When did it stop being enough?" He almost smiled. "I think it stopped being enough the day I realized I couldn't put your mug away. I tried. I put it in the cupboard. I took it back out. I put it in the cupboard again. I stood in my kitchen at 2 in the morning holding a mug that belongs to you. I couldn't put it away because putting it away meant letting go of you."
