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“Why not?”

“Because you live here,” I said, looking up to meet his gaze. “Your life is here.”

“I own a house here,” he corrected smoothly. “That’s real estate, not a prison sentence.”

“Yonas, you have businesses here… an entire network, your friends, your investments, your routines rooted in this city,” I pressed.

“I have managers and partners who get paid obscene amounts of money to run them for me… and I have a plane.”

I stared at him, the sweater still gripped in my hands. “That’s your answer to everything?”

“It solves the geographical problem, doesn’t it?”

“You think every single complication in life can be resolved by throwing money at it.”

“Not everything, just distance,” he said, his mouth twitching with dry humor. “Distance can literally be fixed with high-speed transportation.”

Despite the knot tightening in my throat, a small laugh slipped out of me.

Yonas smiled, that warm, easy look settling over his features. “There she is.”

“Stop,” I murmured softly.

Yonas worked as a senior executive for one of the biggest investment and development firms in the region. His job involved commercial developments, private investments, multimillion-dollar land deals, and a whole bunch of other rich-people business I barely understood because every time he tried breaking it down for me, the conversation eventually disappeared into cap rates, projected returns, and corporate jargon.

“I’m just stating facts,” he added. “You acting like you’re packing up and moving to Mars.”

“It’s far enough.”

“Not for me, it isn’t.”

I stopped folding. The humor drained out of the room, leaving behind an uncomfortable, suffocating stillness.

That was the core of the problem: It wasn’t far enough for him, but it needed to be.

I set the sweater carefully inside the suitcase, smoothed down the sleeves, and turned to face him fully.

I drew in a long breath to steady the tremble in my voice. “Yonas… I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this to you all week.”

Yonas’s smile vanished instantly.

His posture stiffened, his arms dropping to his sides. “Say what?”

“I think we need to end this.”

The silence that followed was thick and heavy.

He stared at me, his dark brows drawing together as if he were trying to translate words from a language he didn’t speak.

“What do you mean? Us? The relationship?”

“Yes.”

“Yo… are you for real right now?”

“Yes, Yonas. I am.” I pressed my palms flat against the denim of my jeans. “It’s not just because I don’t believe in long-distance relationships, though that’s part of it. It’s because I can’t let you put your life on pause, disrupt your routines, or alter the things you’ve built here just to follow me somewhere you don’t belong.”

He looked away for a second, blowing air through his teeth. “Damn.”