“I thought you left,” Dean said.
Not angry. Not sharp. But something about the way he said it punched the air from my lungs.
Of course he’d think that. He’d come back to the cabin to find the Jeep gone. Me gone. A woman he barely knew… But the flicker of distrust in his eyes—God, it made something inside me ache.
“I had to send an email,” I said, breath catching. “There’s no internet—I would’ve asked, but?—”
He didn’t let me finish.
Dean took one step toward me.
Then another.
Then he stopped—just shy of a foot away, like he’d run up against some invisible line he wouldn’t allow himself to cross.
His chest rose sharply. Fell.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he whispered.
A knot pulled tight in my throat because there was something in his voice that hit me in a weird place.
I could see that my absence had done something to him—etched worry into the lines of his face, tightened him in a way he hadn’t been before. And I couldn’t stop the bubble of guilt that rolled in my stomach.
“You don’t know me,” I said quietly. “And I can only imagine how this must’ve looked. I’m sorry. I should’ve waited for you to come back. I should’ve?—”
The words slipped out faster than I meant them to, bare and unguarded, and I had to fight to keep the tremor in my voice from surfacing.
I dropped my gaze to the ground and forced a slow breath into my lungs—one count, then another—giving myself a moment to steady the rush gathering in my chest.
When I looked up again, he hadn’t moved away. In fact—he was closer. Not enough to touch, but enough that I could feel his presence shift toward me instead of away.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly.
The words sounded like they surprised him as much as they did me.
His hand lifted, hesitated—then brushed my arm just above my wrist.
Not a claim. Not a test. Just contact.
The kindness of it caught me off guard. I’d been bracing for distance, for withdrawal—for him to harden the way people usually did when trust wavered. Instead, he was comfortingme, like I was the one who needed reassurance.
Something unknotted in his face then. The tension didn’t disappear, but it loosened—softened into something warmer. More open.
And I realized, quietly, that he was letting me see it.
“I wouldn’t just leave you,” I whispered to him. “I know you have no reason to trust me, but when I give my word, I mean it. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
His jaw went slack, and his breath stuttered—just once. He gave a single, strained nod before he spoke again.
“I like to be prepared,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know if you were coming back, and I––”
He stopped himself, cutting the sentence short, like he’d already said more than he intended to.
Prepared.
The word sliced through me like a knife.
I understood it too well—the way abandonment rearranged you from the inside out. How not knowing became its own kind of wound. You learned to anticipate loss before it happened. To brace. To stay one step ahead so it couldn’t cut quite as deep.
