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"Tell me why."

"Because I'm thirty-five and you're twenty-seven and everyone who looks at us is going to see the same thing. The kid and the older woman having a midlife moment."

"Eight years. I can do math, Selene."

"It's not about the math. It's about... when this wears off, when the newness fades and the season changes and we're just two people with eight years between us. You're gonna want things I'm past. Kids at the right age. Energy I don't have anymore. A woman who matches your timeline."

"My timeline?" Something raw in his voice. "You think I've got a timeline? You think I drop timber and run a ranch because I'm following some plan? I'm here because this is where I landed. You're here because this is where you landed. And the fact that we landed in the same place at the same time is not a problem I need to solve."

"Jake..."

"Who called you."

Eyes close. "My ex-husband."

Different silence. Dense. Charged. The sound of a man going very still.

"What did he say."

"Doesn't matter."

"It matters to me. What did he say."

"He said this is a novelty. That you'll get bored. That I'm too old and sooner or later you'll figure that out and move on to someone who makes more sense."

"And you believe him."

"I don't know what I believe. I just know I'm scared. I came here to not be scared anymore, and instead I'm more terrified than I've ever been in my life."

"Selene..."

"I need time. I'm sorry. I just need time."

The phone goes down before he can answer. Before his voice can reach into my chest and pull me back from the edge I'm standing on.

Kitchen floor. Cold tile under my knees. Burned pasta in the pot, sauce bubbling over, smoke alarm about to go. Get up. Turn off the burner. Scrub the pot until my hands are red and the kitchen is spotless and every surface shines because that's what Richard taught me. When the feelings get too big, make the house smaller. Cleaner. More controlled.

The porch. Dark. Blanket around my shoulders. October wind whipping through pines so hard they sound like the ocean.

My phone lights up. Three times.

Jake:

I'm here when you're ready.

However long that takes.

I'm not him. And I'm not going anywhere.

Phone face down.

Claudia's voice from three months ago, that last phone call before I drove east: "You're not running toward boring, Selene. You're running away from hurt. Those are not the same thing."

She was right. Always right. The man I'm running from isn't Jake Danvers. It's the memory of Richard and the way his quiet disappointment taught me that wanting things was dangerous. That joy was a risk. That the safest love was the one that never made your heart beat fast.

But Jake isn't quiet. Jake isn't reasonable. Jake isn't safe in any of the ways Richard defined safe. Jake is a wildfire in a flannel shirt who brings turkey clubs to women who yelled at him and counts their smiles and built a whole stage thinking about one person standing on it.

And I just pushed him away because a man I already left told me I should.